Sarah Conarro - Select Work Samples 2025
Media: Four-channel Interactive sculpture (paint, wood, sound)
Date: 2023
Themes: Cultural Exchange, Migration, Cultural Heritage, Religion
Exchange Rate with Laura Rivera-Ayala
“Exchange Rate with Laura Rivera-Ayala” is a record of intercultural learning and reciprocity between the artist, serving as a witness bringing an outsider’s gaze, and the curator of New Devotions, Puerto Rican native, Laura Rivera-Ayala. New Devotions explores elements from traditions, including folk Catholicism, African diaspora religions, Indigenous rituals, and Spiritism. Rivera-Ayala curated the show to demonstrate autonomy in light of the violence inherent in colonialism and secularization as this relates to complex racial legacies of slave trade routes and ongoing migratory flows to and from the archipelago. Conarro’s role was provide an approachable and accessible entry point for other outsiders to better learn and understand the personal, place-based knowledge presented by the Puerto Rican artists in the show. To produce the piece, Conarro and Rivera-Ayala texted back and forth for months with Conarro asking questions about New Devotions themes. Conarro cut-and-pasted the off-the-cuff text messages to create a ‘formal interview’ and recorded Rivera-Ayala speaking, resulting in an intimate peek into the curator’s personal narrative as it relates to the themes New Devotions. As a four-channel, interactive audio installation, questions and answers overlap, loop, and repeat, imitating the nature of casual conversation and what it feels like to learn something new that you know nothing about. *shown in New Devotions at The Clemente in NY 2023.
Quanemciput Piliialput-llu : Our Stories and The Things We Made
Media: Painting, Phototransfer, Audio, Video
Date: 2011
Themes: Gentrification, Subsistence Living, Migration, Trauma, Cultural Heritage
Conarro lead visual design on in an interdisciplinary performance project Quanemciput Piliialput-llu : Our Stories and The Things We Made featuring students from nine villages in the Lower Kuskokiwm district celebrating Alaska's 50th year as a state. The ‘celebration’ around statehood is mired with complexity as many people who are now elders in the communities experienced trauma through the government processes. This fact propelled the approach of deeply investing in creating community-led projects centering on interviewing elders to collect their stories about great times, hard realities, and the future. Conarro began the process by visiting Kasigluk is a 550-person Yupik Alaska Native community accessible by plane or boat, to create a 3-panel painting depicting the traditional stories the community chose. This painting was the act as the backdrop for the production and then returned to Kasigluk to be permanently installed in Akiuk School's lobby.
Components of the project::
~ Photo transfer portraits of elders in the community who were interviewed for the production.
~ Stopmotion prologue video incorporating storyknifing to reflect the history of Yup’ik traditional storytelling. Collaborators for this project include Qacung Blanchett, Ryan Conarro, and Katie Basile.
2.2 Square Miles of Soul: Voices of Orange with Ping Chong Co
Media: Animation
Date: 2021
Themes: Gentrification, Redlining
2.2 Square Miles of Soul: Voices of Orange is a documentary production which premiered at Luna Stage. The piece features the real life experiences of local individuals who grew up in Orange, New Jersey. Bearing witness to the different social, political, and economic forces that shaped the community over the course of the last century, and juxtaposing personal impact, resistance, and resilience in the face of historic disinvestment, 2.2 Square Miles of Soul: Voices of Orange fosters a strong sense of community pride, and deeper understanding between and among Orange and surrounding communities.
We See Our Tundra
Media: Mural of 89 shapes for the 90ft chainlink fence
Date: 2010
Themes: Subsistence Living, Trauma, Cultural Heritage
Community members and all students in K-12 at White Mountain School created a collaborative painting for the school fence. Community members of White Mountain, an Iġaluŋmiut (Fish River tribe) Inupiat village 50 miles south of the arctic circle, worked together to paint bright colorful shapes to span the fence outside of the new White Mountain School. This effort was important to the 200 person village as recently the former school burned down. The new school is situated on the perimeter of the village and, combined with the complex traumas of Alaska native history and schools, did not feel very inviting. Conarro collaborated with K-12 students to make designs that community members could add their mark to, promoting that this new school (& largest community building in the village) is for everyone.
Right Now Mind
Media: Social Engagement, Collage, Drawing
Date: Ongoing
Themes: Connection, Dialogue, Mental Health
Right Now Mind is an event series fostering connection through conversation and postcard-writing to send to recipients of their choosing. In a calming environment, participants decompress together, gaining energy for our social responsibility to act for the benefit of all societies.
Right Now Mind is a charging station for global citizens. It is an opportunity for thinkers, givers, and doers to recharge in a low-pressure environment. It is an intentional time to be together, to talk, and to make. Through connecting with one another, we build momentum, strength, and motivation to dedicate active energy towards liberation, equality, and justice for the global community.
Intermission:
Media: Social Engagement
Date: Ongoing
Themes: Female Identity, Experiences, & Roles
Intermission: is a four-course dinner event for femme-identifying individuals to connect with strangers and deepen connections with friends and acquaintances while relaxing and nourishing the mind and the body. Photos of each guests’ hand is documentation of who was present. During dinner, guests are invited to take hand-written, approachable questions from bowls around the table as entry points of dialogue. For every new course, Conarro presents a new seating arrangement. Guests change their seats and are surrounded by new people, new cuisine, and new circumstances. As they leave, guests are given a printed original work of two hands in a gesture of offering created by Conarro for the event.
Intermission: wants to take away the reasons why gathering as women is so challenging. All women face different obstacles that keep them from gathering and building community, leaving few opportunities for multigenerational exchange. This project aims to create an intermission from these constraints.
Tú y Yo / Yo y Tú
Media: Mural, Song, Video
Date: 2024-2025
Themes: Cultural Exchange, Migration, Cultural Heritage
During the 2024-2025 academic year, educators and students at PS018 worked on a multidisciplinary project combining visual arts, music, and video. To begin, Conarro and collaborator Julian Bozeman gathered information in two ways. 1) They met with educators and staff at PS18 to hear educators share curriculum vocabulary and classroom themes that they are emphasizing in their classrooms. 2) They sent a questionnaire to PS18 families asking fun-yet-personal questions about their children (such as positive traits and terms of endearment) as well as cultural heritage questions (ie what foods do they eat at home that are attached to their heritage).
Through exploring that data of families’ answers, Conarro and Bozeman mapped students’ commonalities and connection to one another. Combining this information with teachers’ curriculum desires, they worked with students K-5 to create:
a collaborative mural in their school commons depicting graphs that represent all PS18 caregivers’ answers to fun-yet-personal questions about their children (such as positive traits and terms of endearment)
a school song Tú y Yo, Yo y Tú in Spanish incorporating all of the positive traits offered by families about their children
a music video for Tú y Yo, Yo y Tú using a green screen and hd video cameras to capture one another singing and dancing, as well as feature the mural.
The project was made possible through the support of the Arts for Multilingual Learners grant program from the NYC DOE. To learn more about the project, click here.
After Sunrise
Media: Mobiles - Wood, Mirror, Colored Glass, Filament
Date: 2020
Themes: Mental Health
Conarro designed an ongoing series of mobiles of painted wood pieces, acrylic, mirror, and glass with the goal of creating a meditative vibe that responds to light produces a beautiful environment. The wood components are opaque, causing shadows to mix with the reflections on the wall. The brightly colored glass and the bright colors painted on the wood offer bold, vibrant energy. Conarro structured the mobiles across long pieces of wood in order to move the mobiles series for use in events and settings for conversation and/or meditation.
When the Light Hits the Wall
Media: Painted Wood
Date: 2022
Themes: Connection, Dialogue, Mental Health
When the Light Hits the Wall is an atmospheric wall piece comprising 27 acrylic paintings on diamond-shaped wooden pieces. The 27 diamonds are rearrangeable with no preset format or order. The creative process includes that every morning at sunrise, the light hits the wall where the diamond-shaped paintings hang. It is also notable that for When the Light Hits the Wall hangs in the main communal space of Dreamers Welcome. While works of art are often not shared until they are complete, this piece was on display since its inception, affecting the chromatic mood of Dreamers Welcome, where social engagement projects (dinners, lecture series, etc) are hosted.
A Future as Beautiful as an Iris
Media: Mobiles - Acrylic, Wood, Chain
Date: 2024
Themes: Connection, Environment
Conarro organized a group of adults and teens to come together and create a series of 40 iris paintings. The teens lead the color design by referencing images of the Faqqua Iris. First, wood was cut into different angular shapes and the painters primed and layered colors using a tape resist method. Secondly irises were hand-painted on each piece of wood — no two are exactly are right. The community group painting the irises decided on the message “Power doesn’t make someone right” and this was painted on one side of each painting. Lastly, the teens attached chains from each painting on wood so that the irises can be hung in a manner to be viewed two-sided. The paintings are iris paintings are designed to hang outdoors in one’s garden or have hang indoors to always have a flower in view.
