Sarah Beth Woods
Sarah Beth Woods is a Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist who works collaboratively and cross-culturally. Cultural influences derived from formative years spent living and teaching on the South West side of Chicago manifest in the content and aesthetics of Woods’ work, specifically Black material culture and women’s conceptual spaces as sites of possibility and transformation.
Woods’ earned her BFA at Northern Illinois University and MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Select exhibitions include shows at the University of Michigan's Work:Detroit space, UICA, Grand Rapids, MI, Kent State University Museum, Kent, Ohio, Girls Club, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, A.I.R gallery in Brooklyn, New York, University of Massachusetts, Boston, the Bob & Roberta Smith Kunstverein at Coventry University, Coventry England, NYU Florence, Florence Italy, Genesis Cinema, London, CICA Museum, Gimpo-si South Korea, Galerie Bei Koc, Hannover Germany, and in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Western Exhibitions, Hyde Park Art Center, The Franklin, Jane Addams Hull House Museum, South Side Community Art Center, Threewalls, Arts Incubator, Design Museum of Chicago, and Woman Made Gallery.
Woods and Fatimata Traore, a professional hair braider are the recipients of the 2015/2016 Crossing Boundaries Prize through Arts+Public Life & Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago for their collaboration, BRAID/WORK. Woods is a 2017 3arts 3AP Awardee, which supports Hear the Glow of Electric Lights, a collaborative film and performance project based out of Prosser High School on the west side of Chicago, investigating 1960s American music groups featuring teenage girls and young women.
Land by the Sea, Woods’ current ancestral research project brings her to Szczecin, Poland, formerly occupied by Pomeranians and other ethnic groups. Woods is collaborating with scholars, curators, and archeology groups, as well as a detective specializing in the reacquisition of stolen art and artifacts. This process involves collecting and transcribing the difficult and often intangible histories relating to mass expulsion, cultural erasure, and immigration specifically related to Baltic history.
Sarah Beth Woods has crowd-funded a project with 3AP
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- $5,042 raised of $5,000 goal
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Hear the Glow of Electric Lights is a video and photo-based series that investigates the choreographed performances and culture of 1960s American music groups featuring teenage girls and young women, with the intention of deconstructing the genre’s historical associations with …
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