Sarah Charlesworth

Sarah Edwards Charlesworth (March 29, 1947 – June 25, 2013) was an American conceptual artist and photographer. She is considered part of The Pictures Generation, a loose-knit group of artists working in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, all of whom were concerned with how images shape our everyday lives and society as a whole.

Early life and education Charlesworth was born in East Orange, New Jersey, and raised in Summit, New Jersey. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Barnard College in 1969. Her undergraduate thesis project, a work of conceptual art devoid of text, was a 50-print study of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Prior to that she studied under Douglas Huebler at Bradford College. After completing her degree, she studied briefly under the photographer Lisette Model at The New School.

Work Charlesworth worked in photographic series, but stated in a 1990 interview that she had not really thought of herself as a photographer. She stated, rather, that she viewed her work as investigating questions about the world and her role in it, but realized as of that point that she had been investigating those questions through the medium of photography for the past twelve years. Charlesworth also created the cover art for the very first edition of BOMB magazine. For a series called Modern History (1977–79), she photographed, at actual size, the front pages of 29 American and Canadian newspapers and blanked out everything except for their photographs and mastheads.

In February 1980, Charlesworth created Stills, a series of harrowing, six-and-a-half-foot-tall photographs depicting bodies falling from buildings. When Stills was first shown in 1980 in Tony Shafrazi's East Village apartment, it consisted of seven images. To create the series, Charlesworth scoured news wires and the archives of the New York Public Library for images of people plunging through the air, having jumped out of a windows to commit suicide or because of a catastrophe like fire. After appropriating the photograph, she would crop or tear it, often leaving the edges ragged so that it appeared to be haphazardly torn like a homemade clipping. She would then rephotograph the image and enlarge it. Charlesworth later expanded the series, printing an eighth work from her original source material in 2009 and – as a commission of the Art Institute of Chicago – creating a set of six new ones from the original transparencies that were never printed. Each gelatin silver print was made and mounted to the exact specifications of those she created in 1980.

In her "Objects of Desire" series (1983–1988), Cibachrome prints of appropriated images – typically a cutout picture of a single object, including a gold bowl and a statue of a Buddha – are photographed against bright, laminated monochrome backgrounds that match their lacquered frames.

In the series Renaissance Paintings and Renaissance Drawings (both 1991), Charlesworth combined imagery from disparate Italian Renaissance paintings and drawings to make new, often ironic paintings and drawings.

Charlesworth held various teaching positions at New York University, the School of Visual Arts, and Hartford University. Before her death she taught Master Critique in the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Program and The School of Visual Arts. A major influence on a new generation of artists, including Sara VanDerBeek and Liz Deschenes, she was appointed to the faculty of Princeton University in 2012.

Charlesworth's work is included in the collections of museums around the world, which in 2012 included the Art Institute of Chicago acquiring the complete series (14 photographs) of her over-lifesize series Stills (1980), and the Museum of Modern Art acquired her 27-photo piece Movie-Television-News-History (1979). and the Art Institute of Chicago (2014). A 1998 survey organized by SITE Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico, toured to four additional museums. Her work was included in the Whitney Biennial (1985) and the Venice Biennale (1986). In 1995, she cocurated Somatogenies at New York's Artists Space with fellow artists Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons.