Art Talk: Sara Jimenez & Sarah Freeman

Artist Sara Jimenez and curator Sarah Freeman discuss Jimenez’s installation the story never stops beginning or ending, exploring how textiles, ceramics, and collaged imagery bring together personal memory and histories of American colonization in the Philippines. Through layered landscapes and sculptural forms honoring Filipino women and non-binary individuals, Jimenez creates a space for reflection on history, remembrance, and care.

Sara Jimenez’s work gives form to histories that are often unseen or forgotten, exploring the shifting connections between ancestors, land, memory, and the present. Working across installation, sculpture, collage, and performance, she creates fantastical environments and otherworldly, biomorphic objects that transform these histories into visual metaphors.

Drawing from her kaleidoscopic connection to her genealogical roots in the Philippines, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and the ancient United Kingdom, Jimenez considers how histories change as they move between places and generations, and how forms of memory can exist outside official records.

She draws on archival sources, historical narratives, family histories, and material culture, while also attending to the gaps and silences within official histories. She is interested in forms of resistance and survival that are often overlooked, including the preservation of knowledge, movement through landscapes, and the transmission of cultural memory.

Jimenez uses color, abstraction, and fantastical forms to complicate conventional ideas of monuments and memorials. Rather than presenting history as fixed or complete, her installations consider how objects can transform meaning and unearth history, while her sculptures create alternative ways of remembering. Her site-responsive projects extend this inquiry by responding to the particular histories, architectures, and landscapes of the places where they are made.

Sara Jimenez received her BA from the University of Toronto and her MFA from Parsons School of Design at The New School. Selected solo exhibitions include Rachel Uffner Gallery, Smack Mellon, and Morgan Lehman Gallery, all in New York City. Selected commissions include Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; Wave Hill in New York; and MadArt Studio in Seattle. Jimenez has also exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, The Brooklyn Museum, and The Bronx Museum. Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice. Selected awards and grants include the Canadian Women’s Artist Award from the New York Foundation for the Arts, multiple grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Colene Brown Art Prize from BRIC (Brooklyn Information & Culture). Jimenez is represented by Chozick Family Art Gallery in New York City.