Heritage and Harmony: Sarah Sense

Sarah Sense is an artist from Sacramento, California (1980). She received a BFA from California State University Chico (2003) and a MFA from Parsons the New School for Design, New York (2005).

Sense was the curator/director of the American Indian Community House Gallery (2005–07), where she cataloged to the gallery's 30-year history. Sense has been practicing photo-weaving with traditional basket techniques from her Chitimacha and Choctaw family since 2004. Early works are based on Chitimacha landscape in Louisiana and Hollywood interpretations of Native North America. Sense moved to South America in 2010 for research, where her work changed to include travel journals, landscape photography and family archives, and telling stories to reveal Indigenous histories, most notably her field search of Native art from 12 countries in the Western Hemisphere, for the book and exhibition, Weaving the Americas.

Her new works are inspired by her British Library Visiting Fellowship and include map and landscape weavings focused on colonial impact on climate, with purpose to conceptually reinstate Indigenatiy with traditional weaving patterns while decolonizing colonial maps.