Sarah Cain

Sarah Cain (born 1979) is an American contemporary artist known for her improvisational, site-responsive paintings and installations. Working with a diverse range of materials—including traditional canvas, stained glass, found objects, fabric, musical scores, and architectural surfaces—Cain expands the language of abstraction beyond the canvas. Her work blends painterly rigor with an intuitive embrace of play, color, and non-traditional media. Based in Los Angeles, she has exhibited extensively across the U.S. and abroad, with major solo presentations at the National Gallery of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Tang Teaching Museum, and Crystal Bridges' satellite space The Momentary. In 2019, she completed a 150-foot permanent stained-glass installation at San Francisco International Airport.

Life Cain was born in 1979 in Albany, New York, and raised in nearby Kinderhook. In 1997, she moved to California to study at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she received her BFA in 2001. She earned her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture that same year. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Work

Expansion of Abstraction Cain's practice expands the traditions of abstraction into emotional, embodied, and feminist terrain. Her compositions often begin with a single color—a point of intuitive energy—that radiates outward into spatial environments. As Andrew Berardini wrote "Her paintings begin simply, a point of pure color in space."

Cain challenges the formal austerity of modernist abstraction by introducing personal, symbolic, and sensuous materials—such as feathers, beads, musical scores, and found domestic objects. These elements destabilize hierarchies of value while asserting a new form of aesthetic intensity grounded in lived experience and improvisation. Quinn Latimer observed that Cain "courts seemingly bad ideas," pointing to "drawings sport[ing] feathers and doilies; installations feature eggs and hippy art teacher–like fabric swatches," and noted that she "transforms them so deftly into serious painting that it can take a minute to understand what you’re looking at." David Pagel of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Cain's paintings “reveal that art works best when it keeps you guessing, never settling into a single type, a unified style or a set of moves that are predictable, familiar, reassuring.”

Cain's paintings feature energetic, gestural brushwork that “balances formal rigor… but then she lets ’er rip,” creating a dynamic interplay between control and spontaneity. She often incorporates everyday materials—such as “a locket, some beads, a pendant”—that function “as formal elements in visual compositions.” at the National Gallery of Art, Cain created a 45-foot-long painting which sprawled off the canvas and throughout the atrium—the first time a woman artist had been commissioned to create a site-specific work for the East Building's atrium. “I’ve made more than 50 works on-site,” Cain said. “I love the ephemerality and the present tense and the energy this can capture.” She added: “One of my biggest goals is to make active, exciting, breathable work.” “I gather the words around my work like materials,” Cain said of her process, referencing her use of text-based titles. One example, freedom is a prime number, was lifted from Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives.

Critics have emphasized the sculptural dimensions of her work. In the 2021 exhibition In Nature at The Momentary, Hyperallergic noted Cain's “synthetic beads sewn in and bleeding out of paintings, subtly pushing the realm of painting into the sculptural.” Reflecting on the ephemeral nature of her installations, Cain remarked, “A large part of my practice is ephemeral, so vanishing is innate to the way I work.

Poet Bernadette Mayer responded to Cain’s paintings by saying, “it’s like seeing a rainbow in the middle of the forest.”

Cain described her paintings as “about the collision of various forms of space: physical, emotional and psychic,” and emphasized their evolution over time: “The work tells me how to make it... I need the piece to get lost before it is found.”

Selected exhibitions Solos 2025 – Tell The Poets, Honor Fraser, Los Angeles, CA 2024 – The Path of Totality, Spotlight Series, FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY 2024 – Quiet Riot, Anthony Meier, Mill Valley, CA 2023 – This is the thing they called life, Orange Barrel Media, Columbus, OH 2023 – Sarah Cain, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA 2023 – Sarah Cain, Broadway Gallery, New York, NY 2022 – Hand In Hand, Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME 2021 – My Favorite Season is the Fall of the Patriarchy, National Gallery of Art 2021 – Enter the Center, Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY 2021 – In Nature, The Momentary, Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, AR 2020 – The Possibility of Overcoming Negative Thought, Vielmetter, Los Angeles 2019 – The Sun Will Not Wait, Honor Fraser, Los Angeles 2018 – Wild Flower, Timothy Taylor, London, UK 2017 – Now I’m Going to Tell You Everything, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 2015 – The Imaginary Architecture of Love, Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, NC 2015 – Blue in Your Body, Red When It Hits the Air, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA 2013 – Mountain Song, Aspen Art Museum, CO

Group Exhibitions 2022 – 13 Women, Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California 2021 – Permanent Collections, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas 2019 – Driving Forces: Contemporary Art from the Collection of Ann and Ron Pizzuti, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio 2015 – In ___ We Trust: Art and Money, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio 2014 – Variations: Conversations In and Around Abstract Painting, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California 2013 – Outside the Lines, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas 2012 – Made in L.A., Hammer Museum and LAXART, Los Angeles, California 2012 – Gold, Imperial Belvedere Palace Museum, Vienna, Austria 2012 – Stretching Painting, Galerie Lelong, New York, New York 2011 – Two Schools of Cool, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California 2010 – Feather Throat, Grimmuseum, Berlin, Germany 2008 – California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California 2007 – SECA Art Award Exhibition, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California 2006 – Busan Biennale, Busan, Korea

Public collections Cain's work is held in: Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, Florida Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, Ohio Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, California North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, Texas San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga, New York The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, New York Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, Texas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts UBS Art Collection, New York, New York Zabludowicz Collection, London, United Kingdom