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LOS ANGELES — Last summer, painter Sarah Cain was designing the biggest project of her career: a 45-foot-tall painting for the East Atrium of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, 42-year-old Cain renders causticly colourful. Since the mid-2000s, he has made improvised abstractions and was commissioned to hide the construction walls during the renovation of the atrium’s skylight. Nearby statues of Max Ernst, Isamu Noguchi, and Richard Serra, too large to be moved, were protected by wooden boxes. Cain was also tasked with painting on boxes, each larger than his own studio. (And he needed a title.)
Shortly after, on a scorching afternoon recently, I visited the artist in the mountainous Garvanza neighborhood of Los Angeles. Cain gave me a cup of iced mint tea. To the side was the caption, in festive letters that she borrowed from a meme she saw on Instagram that made her laugh: “My favorite season is the fall of patriarchy.”
The critic Quinn Latimer once referred to Cain’s compulsion for seemingly “bad ideas” such as sticking feathers or pads to the surface of his paintings and drawings. “I make a lot of crazy games,” Cain admitted. “But I just felt like I’ll never get this chance again. Why should I be afraid of one of the biggest problems in the art world?”
Cain’s paintings took on ideas of what serious art might look like. Almost everything about them—their speed, their audacity, their noodle compositions, their splashes and spray-painted doodles, their sticky calculations, their absurdity—seems to undermine the weight traditionally conveyed by large-scale painting.
Spend time with him at the many exhibitions around the country, and it becomes clear that Cain’s art has emerged from its contention with some heavyweight issues: love, death, spirituality and beauty, which have been major themes in Western art history, raise their heads, among others. contemporary concerns such as gender and wealth inequality. Molly Donovan, NGA’s contemporary art curator, says her approach “brings the tradition of abstract painting into the present.”
A survey of his work since 2012 is currently on display at the moment. Frances Young Tang Education Museum and Art Gallery At Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY (until January 2) and a solo exhibition of new work is now open. Broadway Gallery in Manhattan (until October 16). “My favorite season is the collapse of patriarchy” will stay at the NGA until December.
At Tang, Cain painted the entire floor of the gallery, then added repainted sofas to see the work on the walls. Often, his enthusiastic traces spill from the edges of the canvas onto the wall or floor, transforming the painting category into installation. Other times, murals (avoiding the term “wall painting”) involve sliced and deconstructed canvases, along with other possibilities and purposes. When he painted a wall next to the new Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2017, he pasted up sequin backpacks he had bought at a store down the street.
These backpacks, which he took while the piece was being dismantled, appear again in two new paintings in the exhibition at the Broadway Gallery. Beads, threads, crystals, paint rollers, seashells, twigs, plastic flowers, hula hoops and bra works were featured in this new exhibition. He once spent $5 at a thrift store and came up with a bag of trinkets, including fake Hawaiian leis, promising to find ways to incorporate it all into a picture. (“So ugly,” he says, laughing about the job.)
“Sarah embraces marginalized ideas, content and styles – craft, graffiti, feminine, decorative, indigenous,” says Jamillah James, senior curator at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art. “He doesn’t just hug them, he blasts them. He has a completely fearless approach to the environment. ”
To some surprise, Cain’s most frequent response is that his paintings make people feel happy. “Probably because I started from a lot of conflict points,” he says. “Finally, I worked outside of that area. But I don’t set out to make happy pictures.
“I’m very serious as a human being, it’s annoying,” Cain said with a smile. “That’s probably not a nice thing to say, but I think I’d be really depressed if I didn’t paint.”
“He is a wonderfully dissatisfied painter,” says Ian Berry, Tang’s director and curator of Cain’s exhibition there. “It doesn’t repeat itself. He always tries to paint pictures that no one has ever seen before, a truly provocative combination of taste and politics.”
Cain added cut-glass crystals to his paintings, after first hanging them in the windows of a “really sweet but super dangerous” house where he once lived in a gang-ridden area of Los Angeles. “It was a silly New Age conservation thing, but it also made my house look a little crazy. Like, you didn’t want to go into that window.” The crystals and prisms attached to his paintings radiate in truly magical ways, with rainbows strewn across the room when light hits them from certain angles.
Since the recession of 2008, he has drawn “talismans” on dollar bills aimed at bringing money to their owners. “I bought my house from them! I sold 150 at a fair once,” he marvels. “But I really believe in them.”
The conflict in Cain’s work can extend to the experience of being a woman in a male-dominated art world. (“My favorite season is the collapse of patriarchy,” it should be noted, was commissioned by Kaywin Feldman, NGA’s first female director.)
He despairs of the “formats” of artistic genius sustained by the institutions of the art world, and of artists who willingly play together. He says many curators love to discover an artist in his tidy studio (he keeps himself meticulously organized) and take these “messy kids” under their wing. “Too deep and disgusting for me.”
I tell him it’s hard not to read the big pink X painted over one of the statue-shrouded boxes at NGA as a cancellation. It didn’t start out that way, Cain says: “It’s a quick way to take up space. And that’s something my job does, but it’s also something you have to do as a lady in the art world. Even without the physical space, you need to push harder or speak louder. And when you do that, people will resent you.”
While studying at the University of California at Berkeley, she took an influential feminist theory course with the director. Trinh T. Minh-ha. One session focused on sound, dissection studies that show we are culturally conditioned to pay more attention to deep, loud sounds than quiet, high-pitched sounds. Trinh kept her own voice soft and low. “I’ll retrain you,” Cain remembers telling the class. “You’re going to have to listen.” I ask Cain if he’s done that too. “I don’t think I have the luxury of doing that,” he replies.
Earlier in his career, he may have given a different answer. While still in the Bay Area (he moved to Los Angeles in 2007) he would break into abandoned buildings or slums and paint the walls, knowing that his business wouldn’t last. “I really felt that vulnerability was strength,” she explains. “Making art that feels active rather than dead and forever preserved was what I was really after, and still am.”
These days, he says, he’s looking for ways to do things that outlast him. He completed a stained glass window commission for the San Francisco Airport in 2019 and wants to make more public art. “I want to do a bronze job. I want to do more stained glass. I want to make things that are resistant to the elements.”
In other words, he wants to be the artist who has a job. under big wooden box, not on it.
Sarah Cain
Broadway Gallery, 373 Broadway, Lower Manhattan until October 16; (212) 226-4001; Broadwaygallery.nyc.
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