The Biennial is commissioning a new outdoor installation from the exciting emergent New York artist, Sara Jimenez, who works across the media of experimental print, fabric, installation, and video. Selected for the complexity of her research-based practice, which fits compellingly with the interdisciplinary fabric of the Cornell Biennial, Sara is designing a hanging fabric installation on the Arts Quad that dialogues with the Second Empire architecture of the original blue stone buildings on the Arts Quad, which is located in the ancestral homelands of the Cayuga Nation and ancient burial grounds of the Haudenosaunee people. She will be abstracting central architectural forms from the Quad’s oldest buildings, printed on translucent fabrics hanging in a grove of Arts Quad trees that will provide a speculative environment for contemplation of the Quad’s past and present. From a distance, the mass of hanging loose fabric will appear like a wind-blown, flickering flame – a colorful smudge or cloud of color. Up close their loose flowing shapes will bear recognizable architectural forms that will flow from the trees with the texture and contour of the architectural facades.

Sara Jimenez (US/Canada)

As a Filipinx-Canadian artist, Sara Jimenez explores the material embodiment of deep transcultural memories. She works in collage, sculpture, installation, and performance, to create visual metaphors that allude to mythical environments and forgotten global artifacts. Jimenez is a collector and alchemist. Through material experimentation, she combines and rearranges elements from her collections to complicate pre-existing narratives of place, lineage, and temporality.  Based in Brooklyn, Jimenez has exhibited at the Pinto Art Museum (Philippines), El Museo del Barrio, Rush Arts Gallery, BRIC Gallery, BronxArtSpace, FiveMyles Gallery, The Brooklyn Museum, The Bronx Museum, and Smack Mellon, among others. She has performed numerous venues including The Dedalus Foundation, The Noguchi Museum, Jack, The Glasshouse, and Dixon Place. She has been an artist in residence at Brooklyn Art Space, Wave Hill, The Vermont Studio Center (2016), Bronx Museum, Yaddo, BRICworkspace, Art Omi, Project for Empty Space,  LMCC’s Workspace, and Bemis.  She is the recipient of the Cecily Brown Fellowship and has been listed as Smack Mellon’s “Hot Picks” in both 2018 and 2019. Her work was recently acquired as part of the permanent collection of the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice. Upcoming, Jimenez will have solo shows at Irvine Fine Arts Center (Irvine, CA) and The Center for Chinese Contemporary Art (Manchester, England). Jimenez teaches at Parsons the New School for Design, New York University, BMCC, and mentors graduate students at the Vermont College of Fine Art, and the School of Visual Arts.