Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Animation, Printmaking, Installation
Website: sarahklein.com
Sarah Klein is a San Francisco-based visual artist. She received her BA and MFA from Mills College in Oakland, CA. Her practice grew out of a sustained engagement with experimental animation and stop-motion film, and she has built a multifaceted career as an artist, educator, and curator in the Bay Area. In 2008 she founded the screening program Stop & Go, which showcases animations by visual artists and filmmakers. She is the curator and program director of the Peephole Cinema in San Francisco.
She has been awarded residencies at Djerassi Resident Artist Program, M.H. de Young Museum, Jentel Artist Residency, and the Ucross Foundation. Among her residencies is also AGA LAB in Amsterdam, NL, and the McColl Center for the Arts in Charlotte, NC. She has received awards from Kala Art Institute, Headlands Center for the Arts, Trust For Mutual Understanding, and Zellerbach Family Foundation. Most recently she worked in partnership with the Jim Campbell Studio to create a site-specific animation for the top of the Salesforce Tower. This work, titled The Roof Garden, was part of the Midnight Artist Series in July 2021.
Three of Klein’s books — Orbitals, Rotationals, and Velocities — were acquired by The Peninsula Museum of Art in 2023. Inspired by the animation she created for the top of the Salesforce Tower, Klein also developed a kiln-fired glass series exploring themes of loss, separation, and remembrance.
Klein is a visual artist working in animation and printmaking. She employs drawing, paper cutouts, and live-action footage to create narrative and abstract pieces. Informed by a decade of working in stop-motion, she continues to expand on the language of movement within print-based works. Using image sequences and repeated forms, she creates compositions that highlight the parts that make up the whole. She employs silkscreen printing to offset shapes in overlapping and off-kilter arrangements. At its core, her work attempts to grasp order when nothing is fixed — a meditation on time and change.
In recent years, her work has focused on themes of loss, separation, and remembrance. Botanical source imagery drawn from her own garden and the garden of a friend who passed away during one of the recent Northern California fires has appeared prominently in this work. In her solo installation SUPERBLOOM, Klein harnessed her skills as an animator and printmaker to create a vivid display of patterns and motion that expanded on the ancient method of storytelling using hand shadows. As silhouetted hands sway and rotate, patterns emerge that produce kaleidoscopic effects, while silkscreened prints originated from still frames in the animations form paper borders stretching across the gallery walls.
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