Sara Garden Armstrong is a visual artist whose decades-long practice embraces a wide range of scales 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. The layered flat work and sculptural installations 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.
Recent atrium commissions have focused on scientific phenomena and their interactions with the human condition such as the installation for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Alabama-Mississippi Chapter, at the University of Alabama Birmingham (UAB) Medical Center. A past recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation CALL (Creating a Living Legacy) grant through Space One Eleven, Armstrong has exhibited nationally and internationally for over 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, published in 2020, reveals the influences and concepts that run through her diverse body of work. It coincided with a traveling exhibition of the same name, incorporating site-specific work. The exhibition made its final stop at the Gadsden Museum of Art, January 2023.
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.
