Sarah McKenzie

When the Frame is a Cage (Common Room, Denver Women’s Correctional)

2022

Sarah McKenzie is a painter based in Boulder, Colorado. She holds a BA in film studies from Yale University and an MFA in painting from the University of Michigan. McKenzie’s paintings document our built landscape, exploring changes in our architecture (what we build) for evidence of social, economic, and cultural shifts (why we build). Over time, her work has focused on construction sites, abandoned buildings, hotel rooms, and (most recently) the white-walled interiors of museums and galleries. Since early 2020 she has been researching a new project exploring the architecture of prisons. McKenzie has exhibited her paintings nationally, including shows with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Yale School of Architecture, the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Aspen Art Museum, and the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, among other venues. In 2012, McKenzie received a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant, and in 2019, she was awarded the 10th Alexander Rutsch Award for Painting. In Spring 2021, McKenzie received the Marion International Fellowship for the Visual and Performing Arts to support her prison architecture series. When she is not in the studio, McKenzie helps to run Tilt West, a Denver-based arts and culture nonprofit, and she teaches visual art through the University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative (DU PAI).