Sarah Crowner : Serpentear

New York–based artist Sarah Crowner (born 1974) makes paintings, ceramics, sculptures, installations and theatre sets. Her large-scale sewn canvases display a fluency in mid-20th-century art, artists and architecture, with a particular regard for geometric abstraction and Color Field compositions. Crowner’s rigorous practice has long engaged thematic research with an abiding interest in materials, craft, and their related histories and processes. This beautifully produced, comprehensive publication spans over a decade of the artist’s wide-ranging practice, documenting all of her major works to date, including her most recent exhibitions in Mexico and Brazil. Essays by Nikki Columbus, Diego Matos and Ingrid Schaffner discuss Crowner's tileworks, paintings and designs for the stage in depth, showing how she has drawn inspiration from Mexican culture across disciplines and throughout the history of modernism as a whole. A portfolio of images is featured alongside Quinn Latimer’s lyrical narrative poem "Score for Three Snakes."

Nikki Columbus is a writer, curator, and editor based in New York. Her writing and programming focus on museums and social justice, performance, and contemporary art of the Middle East. She has written for n+1 and numerous art publications, organised public forums for the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, held editorial posts at Parkett and Artforum, and curated at Townhouse Gallery in Cairo. She is currently working on a book about maternal discrimination. Quinn Latimer is a poet, critic, and editor whose work often explores feminist economies of writing, reading, and image production. Her publications include Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (2017), Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (2013), and Rumored Animals (2012). Her writings have appeared in Artforum, the Paris Review, the White Review, and Texte zur Kunst, and her performance and language-based works have been featured widely. She is the editor or coeditor of various publications, including Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology (2021), Simone Forti: The Bear in the Mirror (2019), The documenta 14 Reader (2017),and Pamela Rosenkranz: No Core (2012). Previously, Latimer was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel. She is now head of the master’s program at the Institute Art Gender Nature in Basel, where, with Chus Martínez, she organises a semiannual symposia series on questions of gender, language, social justice, and artistic practice. She lives and works in Basel and Athens. Ana Elena Mallet is a Mexico City–based curator specialising in modern and contemporary design. She is currently a distinguished lecturer at the School of Architecture, Art and Design of the Tecnológico de Monterrey. A member of the acquisitions committee of the department of architecture and design of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she has collaborated as curatorial advisor and member of advisory and acquisitions boards with many museums and university collections. Mallet has held positions as curator at the Museo Soumaya and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, as deputy director of programming at the Museo Rufino Tamayo, and as chief curator of the Museo del Objeto del Objeto. As an independent curator she has organised exhibitions for various museums in Mexico and abroad. Diego Matos is a São Paulo–based researcher, professor, and curator specialising in the fields of art and architecture. In 2021, with Márcio Seligmann-Silva, he co-organised the permanent exhibition MemoriAntonia: For an Active Memory in the Service of Human Rights at the Maria Antonia Center, University of São Paulo. Matos was chief curator of the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture and Ecology (2022–23) and the primary author and guest editor of Cahiers d’Art’s edition dedicated to the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles in 2022. Matos holds PhD and master’s degrees from the Architecture and Urbanism College, University of São Paulo. Ingrid Schaffner is curator at the Chinati Foundation / La Fundación Chinati in Marfa, Texas. In 2018, she organised the Carnegie International, 57th Edition at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. From 2001 to 2015, she was chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where she organised many exhibitions, including Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry (2011), Queer Voice (2010), and Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay (with Jenelle Porter in 2009). Schaffner is currently at work on a history of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the summer residency program founded in 1946 by artists for artists.