Snow Shadows

Sabra Booth

Exhibition: Jan 20 – May 8, 2022


Our first Main Space exhibition this year features local artist and City of San Antonio Department of Arts & Culture 2022 Individual Artist Grant recipient, Sabra Booth. Booth’s studio practice offers interpretative observations of nature while addressing complex ecological issues, and Snow Shadows further explores this interest. 

In February 2021, what began as a rare and exciting opportunity for Texas residents to experience significant snowfall turned devastating as the Texas power grid failed, causing rolling blackouts across most of the state. The freezing temperatures also lead to disrupted water service, that combined with power loss, forced some to flee their homes to seek safe shelter elsewhere. 

Snow Shadows documents the events of winter storm Uri by replicating shadows from frozen and dying plants. “Plants were irreparably frozen, including some from my own yard, such as iconic San Antonio species, agaves, and prickly pears,” said Booth. Utilizing non-toxic color inks on large sheets of kōzo paper, airbrushed with a pearlescent white watercolor, Booth’s abstract paintings will fill the Main Space gallery windows, allowing natural light to filter through the paper, illuminating the paintings. 

The artist purposefully creates light, playful paintings to signify the events of the winter storm in the hope that the installation will encourage reflection on both the unexpected beauty and perils prompted by climate change. 

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Miles Fermin and Greg Johnson for their assistance, Marisol Cortez for her environmental advocacy, the City of San Antonio Arts & Culture Department and Artpace for their sponsorship, Rachel Carson for igniting my interest in ecology, and my mother, Barbara Booth, for showing me how to notice nature. 

Sponsors

Artpace San Antonio’s presentation of this exhibition has been made possible through the generous support of the City of San Antonio Department of Arts & Culture, the John L. Santikos Charitable Foundation of the San Antonio Area Foundation, and the Texas Commission on the Arts through their ongoing support of Artpace’s exhibitions and programs.

Artist

Sabra Booth

San Antonio, Texas, USA

Sabra Booth is an MFA graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and a BFA graduate from the University of Houston, Houston, Texas. She is a lecturer in fine arts at the Alamo Colleges District in Bexar County, Texas and in the community program at the Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, Texas. She lived in New York for five years teaching in public schools and several non-profit organizations, such as the Lower East Side Printshop. Prior to this, she was a nationally recognized exhibitions designer for the Ginzbarg Nature Discovery Center in Houston. Before attending graduate school, she was an assistant to Tamarind master printers at the Houston Fine Art Press. Early experiences on the beaches of south Florida and her present exploration of the Texas landscape affect her artistic vision. 

Working in a variety of mediums, she uses drawing, mixed media, printmaking, and stop motion animation. Recent travels in Japan and a Fulbright Mid-Career Professional Grant to Finland in 2007 have had a great impact on her work. These experiences led to further simplified forms. Natural objects are magnified and cropped until they become otherworldly. Like a 19th century naturalist, she often sketches flora and fauna on site. Design considerations are evident through the implementation of graphic lines, negative space, actual texture, and limited color. Her work also includes collagraph prints from actual plants. Reflections on gender variations within the natural world are an important aspect of Booth’s research. 

Booth’s exhibition record is both national and international. Presently, she has an installation entitled, Walled Off, on display at the Valley International Airport in Harlingen, Texas. She was included in the 2021 ABC No Rio show, CATACLYSM, in New York. In 2020, she had a solo retrospective exhibition, Hot Pursuit: A Visual Commentary on Climate Change, at Bihl Haus Arts in San Antonio, Texas. She also completed an artist-in-residence program for the UNESCO World Heritage Site: San Antonio Missions National Historical Park in 2019. She will be collaborating with the New York Historical Society and Central Booking, a New York arts organization, on a project about the Brooklyn waterfront in 2022.

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