Sarah Crowner

Sarah Crowner was born in 1974 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She earned a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1996, studied at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and completed an MFA at Hunter College, City University of New York, in 2002. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Crowner's signature technique, painting individual canvas panels and then sewing them together into a single surface, lets her build compositions that read as unified paintings while carrying the visible seams of their construction. The work draws on twentieth century geometric abstraction and color field painting, as well as patterns found in architecture and nature, and it extends into glazed ceramic tile floors and walls, freestanding sculpture, and stage design.

Her institutional profile grew steadily through the 2010s and 2020s. She was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and in Museum of Modern Art and Walker Art Center group exhibitions in the following years. In 2016 she presented a solo exhibition at MASS MoCA. She was included in the 57th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2018, and held the 2019 to 2020 Rome Prize in visual arts from the American Academy in Rome, alongside a 2019 residency with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida. In 2022 the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, commissioned a site specific tile installation that remained on view into 2024, and she held a solo exhibition, Serpentear, at Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico, the same year. In 2023 the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis presented Sarah Crowner: Around Orange, three site specific works responding to the museum's Tadao Ando building and to Ellsworth Kelly's Blue Black, and the Hill Art Foundation in New York presented The Sea, the Sky, a Window, placing her work in dialogue with the Hill Collection. In 2025 and 2026 The Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach presented a duo exhibition pairing her work with that of Etel Adnan.

Museums have consistently framed Crowner's project as one of active dialogue with the history of abstraction rather than simple homage. Her inclusion in the Whitney Biennial (2010) and the Carnegie International (2018), followed by a Rome Prize and a run of site specific commissions at the Chinati Foundation, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, and the Hill Art Foundation, reflects a critical and curatorial consensus that her sewn canvas technique offers a genuinely new way of extending geometric and color field abstraction into sculpture, architecture, and installation.

Crowner's auction market is small relative to her museum footprint. The highest documented result located is Rotated Stretched Stems, Cropped, which sold for USD 378,000 at Phillips; the exact sale date is not confirmed in available sources. Other Phillips results include Greens Window (Brazil) at USD 139,700 and Flying Painting #2 at USD 38,100. A sewn canvas, Continuum, 1963 (Part 4), sold at Wright in November 2024 for USD 17,640. A 2023 canvas, Untitled (Around Orange), carried a Sotheby's estimate of USD 200,000 to 250,000, though the realized price for that lot is not confirmed and should not be read as a sale result.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Crowner's work, and authentication runs through her representing galleries: Luhring Augustine in New York and Kayne Griffin in Los Angeles. Her market is genuinely young and thinly traded at auction, so provenance and gallery confirmation matter more than usual, and any single auction result, including her current high, should be read against a small and inconsistently reported sales history rather than treated as a stable benchmark.