Sarah Evenson Shares Artist Talk with Studio Arts Students

November 7, 2023

Sarah Evenson joined Studio Arts students and faculty on Tuesday, November 7, 2023 for an hour-long artist talk about their recent work and practice. Evenson is one of the visiting artists who attended the Mini Portfolio Day exercise in early October and provided portfolio feedback to Perpich Visual Arts and Media Arts seniors to help them prepare for Portfolio Day on October 9, 2023.

Sarah’s artist talk centered on their artistic career, personal background, switching directions in college to transfer from NYU to MCAD, and over time growing to bring more and more of their authentic self into their artwork. In addition to sharing work visually on the screen, Sarah passed around a collection of zines they have created over the past several years so the students could have a personal, tactile connection with the work.

“Sarah’s work explores their personal experience as a gay, transgender person healing through top surgery, processing the experience of loss, collaborative narratives, and playful prints and animations about vampires, relationships, ideas about attaining an MFA, etc.,” said Kathryn D’Elia, Visual Arts Instructor and Studio Arts Chair. “The students resonated with how vulnerable and open Sarah’s work is and how candid they were about the process for balancing work and art.”

Sarah Evenson (they/them/theirs) is a gay, transgender printmaker/zinemaker/illustrator/animator/artist-at-large living and working in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Their bright and colorful work centers play as resistance, celebrates queer joy, and testifies to the strength and creative potential of the transgender body. Evenson’s zines and artist books are included in more than 40 institutions across the English-speaking world and beyond, most notably, the libraries of the Walker Art Center, the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Tate Britain. But above all, Sarah makes art because they believe it is the right thing to do and it makes them happy to do so.