ABOUT

 

Sara Garden Armstrong is a visual artist whose creative research/practice spans a

wide range of mediums and techniques, from large site-specific sculpture to artist’s

books. Her work addresses organic change and transformation while exploring

properties of materials, resulting in nature-based biomorphic abstraction. Layered two-

dimensional work and sculptural installations that often incorporate video projection and

sound, focus on life processes such as breathing and support systems of the body.

Other recurrent themes are water, time, and shifts of reality, with their elements of

chance and change. 

Former atrium commissions have focused on scientific phenomena and their interactions

with the human condition, such as the installation for the National Multiple Sclerosis

Society at the University of Alabama Birmingham (UAB) Medical Center. A past recipient

of the Joan Mitchell Foundation's CALL (Creating a Living Legacy) grant through Space

One Eleven, Armstrong’s national and international exhibition record extends over a

period of more than 40 years. Her artist’s books can be found in the collections of the

Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among

others.

The monograph SARA GARDEN ARMSTRONG: Threads and Layers, 2020, reveals

the influences and concepts that run through her diverse body of work. Its publication

coincided with a traveling exhibition of the same name, incorporating site-specific work.

The exhibition made stops in a three state area—Georgia, Florida and Alabama.

Armstrong received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Alabama and a

Master of Art Education from UAB. After living in New York City for 36 years, in 2017

she returned to Birmingham, where she currently lives and works in her building, which

provides space for Ground Floor Contemporary Gallery (an artist-run collective) on the

first floor and 21st Street Studios on the 3rd floor.