Sara Garden Armstrong marks a homecoming, by JESSE CHAMBERS

Iron City Ink

Sara Garden Armstrong will show her installation at 5 p.m. Feb. 2 at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, while her drawings will be displayed from 6-9 p.m. Feb. 2 at 21st Street Gallery.

Artist and Birmingham native Sara Garden Armstrong has lived in New York 35 years, making drawings, artist books and sculptures.

And the city’s been good for her, she said by phone from her Queens studio.

“It has a huge amount of energy, an amazing amount of art to see, wonderful conversations,” she said. “I love this place.”

Armstrong certainly doesn’t regret moving to New York from Birmingham in 1982 but, she said, “Now it’s time for another change.” She’s got a plan to move back to the Magic City full time in 2017.

“I want to do some things in Birmingham,” she said, and she’ll get started with two exhibitions, running concurrently Feb. 2-March 4.

Her multimedia installation, Breath and Shadow, will be at the Vulcan Materials Gallery at the Alabama School of Fine Arts.

Echo, an exhibition of 20 large-scale drawings, will be at the 21st Street Gallery.

Armstrong has exhibited nationally and internationally for almost 40 years, and her pieces are found in such collections as the Museum of Modern Art. 

And her work has one overarching theme. “It’s always organic,” she said.

Breath and Shadow is no exception. It mixes Armstrong’s work from different periods, including early drawings and hanging sculptures that look like natural shapes, such as leaves and seed pods. 

Some of the sculptures will move, cast shadows and appear to breathe, creating a living environment of air, light and sound.

“Breath and breathing have been in my work for a long time,” Armstrong said.

The Echo drawings, from the 1980s and 1990s, explore the same sculptural forms used in the ASFA installation.

“Some of these have never been shown,” she said.

Armstrong’s excited about returning to Birmingham, where she’s often visited and made work — including an atrium sculpture at UAB’s Civitan building.

One reason is affordability, given the Big Apple’s high costs.

“I have a gorgeous [work] space that I can’t have in New York,” she said.

It helps that Armstrong is moving back to her own three-story building downtown, the 21st Street Studios, which she bought in 1979 and has rented out.

The building contains artist spaces, as well as the 21st Street Gallery, the recently opened Ground Floor Contemporary gallery and the American Institute of Architects chapter.

Birmingham also has changed for the better, according to Armstrong.

“It’s much more open and has more going on,” she said.

And Armstrong sees positive signs in the visual arts community.

“There’s a younger group [of artists] that are doing some really interesting things,” she said. “I would like to help contribute to that energy that’s here.”

Echo is curated by Cumbee Tyndal, ASFA visual arts instructor.

The Vulcan Materials Gallery at ASFA will host an opening for Breath and Shadow Feb. 2 at 5 p.m.

The Echo opening at 21st Street Gallery, 111 Richard Arrington Jr. Blvd. S., will be Feb. 2, 6-9 p.m.

Downtown gains new gallery space By Daniel DeVaughn

Photo by Kelsey Freeman

Upon entering the gallery space at Ground Floor Contemporary, one is immediately struck by a sense of openness and light. Just about every surface from floor to ceiling in the cavernous room is a clean pearl white, highlighting each of the pieces hung on its walls.

Located in the space formerly occupied by Space One Eleven, Ground Floor Contemporary grew out of a somewhat storied collective of artists, known as 21st Street Studios. The group has been led (remotely until now) by painter and installation artist Sara Garden Armstrong, who, for the past 35 years, has lived and worked in New York City, where she made her name as an artist. Originally from Birmingham, New York became her home away from home because of a certain spirit, a passionate engagement.

"New York for me is a lot of interesting conversations and thought," Armstrong says. "So I think it's very exciting that there's this mixed range of ages and ideas and an energy, and that's really important to me."

Armstrong, along with fellow artists and 21st Street Studios members Rae Trimmier and Tara Lee, created Ground Floor Contemporary with those same values in mind. They wanted it to be a place where anyone in the community could go to see art, but also hear real people having real conversations about real life.

In July of this year, Ground Floor Contemporary held its grand opening and first exhibition. The show featured an impressive range of all-female talent--Madeline Evans, Elizabeth Marie Farr, Ashley Wingo, Barbara Hirschowitz, and Rae Trimmier, all Alabama artists. It was a rainy Thursday evening--so rainy, in fact, that Armstrong, Trimmier, and Lee were uncertain whether anyone would be interested enough to brave a summer thunderstorm for their sake.

The exhibition ended up bringing out more than 150 people. It was a shocking response from the community, a relative groundswell of support for a gallery holding its entree exhibition in an area of town not typically known for its art galleries.

"I think we've got the artists," Armstrong says. "We've got the group. What we want to be is really important to you as an artist. That's the biggie--that is important."

Armstrong's deep care for the artists themselves, as well as the family they are forming within the walls of the gallery, is what makes GFC a treasure in Birmingham's arts scene. Ground Floor Contemporary isn't a place to simply come and buy decorations or gifts, nor is it lost in a hermetic concern for art-with-a-capital-A. These artists have christened an open space; it just so happens to be one eminently concerned with art and its ability to touch the community.

As Lee says of Armstrong, "Sara encourages us to go beyond our comfort zone, to experiment, because we do say that this is a safe place for us to do things that we wouldn't necessarily do."

Birmingham Magazine - December issue