Sarah Cain (born 1979) is an American contemporary artist known for her improvisational, site-responsive paintings and installations. Working with a diverse range of materialsâÂÂincluding traditional canvas, stained glass, found objects, fabric, musical scores, and architectural surfacesâÂÂCain expands the language of abstraction beyond the canvas. Her work blends painterly rigor with an intuitive embrace of play, color, and non-traditional media. Based in Los Angeles, she has exhibited extensively across the U.S. and abroad, with major solo presentations at the National Gallery of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Tang Teaching Museum, and Crystal Bridges' satellite space The Momentary. In 2019, she completed a 150-foot permanent stained-glass installation at San Francisco International Airport.
Cain was born in 1979 in Albany, New York, and raised in nearby Kinderhook. In 1997, she moved to California to study at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she received her BFA in 2001. She earned her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture that same year. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Cain's practice expands the traditions of abstraction into emotional, embodied, and feminist terrain. Her compositions often begin with a single colorâÂÂa point of intuitive energyâÂÂthat radiates outward into spatial environments. As Andrew Berardini wrote "Her paintings begin simply, a point of pure color in space." Jonathan Griffin remarked in The New York Times, "CainâÂÂs paintings are joyfully defiant. They sprawl, envelop, and sparkle." In a 2015 interview with Flash Art, Cain stated, âÂÂI paint through ideas and feelings IâÂÂm incapable of speaking through,â aligning her visual abstraction with poetic and musical forms of expression.
Cain challenges the formal austerity of modernist abstraction by introducing personal, symbolic, and sensuous materialsâÂÂsuch as feathers, beads, musical scores, and found domestic objects. These elements destabilize hierarchies of value while asserting a new form of aesthetic intensity grounded in lived experience and improvisation. Quinn Latimer observed that Cain "courts seemingly bad ideas," pointing to "drawings sport[ing] feathers and doilies; installations feature eggs and hippy art teacherâÂÂlike fabric swatches," and noted that she "transforms them so deftly into serious painting that it can take a minute to understand what youâÂÂre looking at."
Art in America described her work as balancing "shifting, kaleidoscopic color into the space [and] was physically and perceptually immersive, revealing new dimensions to viewers as they moved through it." David Pagel of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Cain's paintings âÂÂreveal that art works best when it keeps you guessing, never settling into a single type, a unified style or a set of moves that are predictable, familiar, reassuring.âÂÂ
Cain's paintings feature energetic, gestural brushwork that âÂÂbalances formal rigor⦠but then she lets âÂÂer rip,â creating a dynamic interplay between control and spontaneity. She often incorporates everyday materialsâÂÂsuch as âÂÂa locket, some beads, a pendantâÂÂâÂÂthat function âÂÂas formal elements in visual compositions.â These objects act as both structural and symbolic components within her work.[ò] âÂÂThe shrine-like parts of my site works are personal,â Cain explained. âÂÂA lot of the objects are gifts, or found and held onto for years. They speak about my own life but also the subcultures IâÂÂve traveled through. I think of them a bit like diary entries.
"There is freedom in a found object," remarked Cain. The artist frequently pushes painting beyond the stretcher, incorporating architectural interventions and everyday materials to create immersive environments. Her large-scale works often take the form of murals, floors, furniture, and windows, turning painting into a spatial and participatory act.
In her 2021 exhibition My Favorite Season is the Fall of the Patriarchy at the National Gallery of Art, Cain created a 45-foot-long painting which sprawled off the canvas and throughout the atriumâÂÂthe first time a woman artist had been commissioned to create a site-specific work for the East Building's atrium. âÂÂIâÂÂve made more than 50 works on-site,â Cain said. âÂÂI love the ephemerality and the present tense and the energy this can capture.â She added: âÂÂOne of my biggest goals is to make active, exciting, breathable work.âÂÂ
Cain's canvases are marked by sweeping, layered paint âÂÂlavished... on walls, floor, ceiling, upholstered furniture, wood furniture, dollar bills⦠and rectangles of canvasâ in an âÂÂedgy restlessnessâ that animates her installations. She pairs this expressive gesture with an eclectic assemblage of everyday items â âÂÂnecklaces, thread, crystals, dried roses, sea shellsâ among others â integrating them directly into her work as both physical anchors and visual motifs that challenge conventional hierarchies of material and media. âÂÂI gather the words around my work like materials,â Cain said of her process, referencing her use of text-based titles. One example, freedom is a prime number, was lifted from Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives.
Her 2019 permanent stained-glass installation at San Francisco International Airport, We Will Walk Right Up To The Sun, features 270 unique panes of color, each painted so that no two adjacent panes share the same hue. Cain remarked "If a work is going to span that much space, you want the viewer to keep discovering things."
In 2023, she completed This is the thing they called life, a site-specific painting on the headquarters of Orange Barrel Media, including three 70-foot-tall silos.
Critics have emphasized the sculptural dimensions of her work. In the 2021 exhibition In Nature at The Momentary, Hyperallergic noted Cain's âÂÂsynthetic beads sewn in and bleeding out of paintings, subtly pushing the realm of painting into the sculptural.â Reflecting on the ephemeral nature of her installations, Cain remarked, âÂÂA large part of my practice is ephemeral, so vanishing is innate to the way I work.
CainâÂÂs practice is rooted in a heightened sensitivity to color as both structure and subject. âÂÂEvery color is intentional,â she stated in a 2019 interview with T Magazine, referring to her stained-glass installation. Andrew Berardini described her palette as âÂÂA raunchy Italian orange, a mossy verdigris the color of woods witchesâ potions, a purple stain like a fresh bruise on the tough and tender skin of a street kid, the glitter swirling over it like the sparkle of guardian fairies, a blunt mercurial red softened with blessed unguents and essential oils, a green like a dying dollar bill unrolling into music and talisman... a solitary ray, bare as a ghost.âÂÂ
Poet Bernadette Mayer responded to CainâÂÂs paintings by saying, âÂÂitâÂÂs like seeing a rainbow in the middle of the forest.âÂÂ
Cain described her paintings as âÂÂabout the collision of various forms of space: physical, emotional and psychic,â and emphasized their evolution over time: âÂÂThe work tells me how to make it... I need the piece to get lost before it is found.âÂÂ
Cain's titlesâÂÂsuch as Now IâÂÂm Going to Tell You Everything and My Favorite Season is the Fall of the PatriarchyâÂÂalign her with a lineage of feminist poetics. And she often refers to feminist figures in the titles of her works, from pop culture, politics, and art. According to the Henry Art Gallery, Cain âÂÂredefines abstraction in feminist terms as an architecture for transformative, embodied, emotive experience,â and âÂÂintentionally subverts male-dominated art historical traditions by insisting on the value of feminine, queer, and othered aesthetics.âÂÂ
Cain's work is held in: