"We know it has been February 23rd since The Bronx Museum of the Arts
announced that Sarah Sze was chosen to represent at The Venice Biennale for The
USA at the upcoming 2013 Venice Biennale. The Biennial Project did not report to you about this then because we were busy that week doing our thing
at The 2012 Whitney Biennial and throwing ‘a time’ at The First Windsor-Whitney Biennial.
The Biennial Project is all balls out not only because we love, love, love her work - we are doublly proud because Ms. Sze (pronounced ZEE) is, you
know, a Bostonian, born and raised right here in capital city of the Bay
State, the home base for us, The Biennial Project.
Wicked fuckin’ pissa!!
Let’s make a Packie Run and buy some scratchies,and get retarded.
Sarah is no average chowder head. She comes from a notable family. Her great Grandfather, Dr. Alfred Sao-ke Sze was the first Chinese ambassador to the
US and her Grandfather Szeming Sze confounded The World Health Organization.
Grandma Bessie Li was a pianist. Her Dad Chia-Ming Sze is a
Chinese-American architect whose firm is located at 326 A Street in Southie.
He designs lots of municipal projects around town. He can be reached at
chiaming@szearch.com or by phone 617-451-2727. Sarah’s Mummy is Judy Sze and
like most of Boston is of Irish descendent and is a retired schoolteacher.
We would never want to label her Lace Curtin. Judy's father was Alexander
Mossman, known as Sandy, an advertising executive who was Brookline Rat born on December 28th, 1897. Her Bother David Li Ming Sze attended Buckingham, Brown & Nichols in Cambridge and is now a general partner at Grey Lock Partners a private Equity firm located in San Mateo, CA and sits on the boards of Facebook, LinkIn, and Pandora to name a few.
Sarah grew up on Beacon Hill in a 4 bedroom, 1890 mansard-roofed house
located at 44 Pinckney Street. According to Zillow the 3.242 sqft house is
valued at $2,165,447 and the 2012 property taxes were $24.197. Her folks
still live there. It's not the Triple Decker we are used to but we are sure
it has tons of chacta you knows.
Sze attended the Beacon Hill Nursery School with the other Brahmins at 74
Joy Street. Beacon Hill Nursery School which was founded in 1955and whose primary mission is:
"to nurture our students' innate curiosity and lay the foundation for a
lifelong love of learning. We believe that children who develop strong
self-concepts and social and emotional skills are most successful both in
school and later in life."
Sarah left the Hill to further her education on the other side of the
Charles at The Shady Hill School at 178 Coolidge Hill in The Peoples
Republic of Cambridge. When Sarah Sze started as a Beginner at Shady Hill in
1973, a teacher described her as being "good at imaginative play." When she
graduated from the school's ninth grade in 1984, a teacher commented on her
"considerable artistic ability."
After Shady Hill, Sarah went on to Milton Academy which is a coeducational
independent preparatory boarding and day school in Milton, Massachusetts
consisting of a grade 9-12 Upper School and a grade K8 Lower School. Milton
is noted for its prestige and strong academic programs, having produced many
notable alumni, including Nobel Laureate, T. S. Eliot, several members of the
United States Congress, Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts,
Saturday Night Live comedian Jenny Slate, James Taylor and a handful of
Kennedy's.
The Biennial Project knows of this institution as Mouth-on Academy because of the oral sex scandal that happened there a few years back when a 15 year-old female student gave head to five boys on the Hockey team, one right after another.
We like to think of Sarah as a teenager in the 80s hanging out in the Pit in Harvard Square or The Rat in Kenmore. She’d be rockin’ out to Tracy Chapmen or The J Geils Band, spraying her locks into a Hair Wall otherwise known as The Quinzee Claw or the Revere Claw.
Sarah Sze was invited back to Milton in 2007 to be the graduation speaker
when she gave the students permission to fail or be failures. Sarah’s sick
nasty work entitled ‘The Edge of One of Many Circles’ is a permanent
installation at Milton Academy’s Schwarz Student Center. Sarah installed
it in 2006.
After graduating Summa Cum Laude from Yale University in 1991, Sarah spent
a year in Japan working in Television and studying ikebana, which is Japanese
flower arranging. In 1992 she once again donned her skally and returned to
Taxachusetts where she worked in a Boston public school art-education
program and painted on weekends.
It was that she met her Barney husband Siddhartha Mukherje while he was at Harvard Medical School. He then worked at Man’s Greatest Hospital, MGH .He authored the 2010 book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and was described by TIME Magazin, as one of the 100 most influential books of the last 100 years, and by the New York Times magazine as among the 100 best works of non-fiction.
Unfortunately New York City attracts Boston artists like flies on shit and
Sarah and Siddhartha moved down to the big apple so she could attend SVA.
Whateva!!
In 2002 Sarah hopped on ‘the Pike’ and returned back home to Boston as
the second resident artist to participate in the series RSVPmfa, in which
artists are invited to respond to and work among the collections,
architecture, and grounds of the Museum of Fine Arts. At the MFA she selected the
activity-filled West Wing entrance, which extends to a second floor that is
visible through an elliptical balcony. Fascinated by the energy of the many
distractions in this area, as well as by the movement of the viewer through
space via escalators, Sze had a field day constructing her piece to unite
the first and second floors. It was anchored on a corner of the second floor
and swept up into the barrel vault above spanning the space above the first
floor and descending from a supporting column to the floor of the lobby. On
the first trip home Sze was greeted by Beacon Hill neighbors at a party
sponsored by the Beacon Hill Village.
Maybe she was craving a Regulah at Dunkies! Because Sarah banged a U-ie again in 2004 and returned to Red Sox Nation to put up the permanent installation ’Blue Poles’. This piece is a whimsical miniature fire escape on the front of MIT's Sidney-Pacific Graduate Residence. The work, commissioned by MIT's Percent-for-Art Program, is titled "Blue Poles", in honor of Jackson Pollock's 1952 drip painting by that name. This is totally ‘the shit’ and it is made of small blue steel ladders, balconies and stairways welded into fire-escape-like clusters, "Poles" climbs to the roof of the six-story building from just above the front door. In designing "Blue Poles," Sze said that she was inspired by her childhood memories of fire escapes on apartment buildings near her home. Those rickety iron or wooden structures, used both as places to relax and as escape routes, are rarely found on new buildings; "Blue Poles" reconnects the Sidney- Pacific residence to its urban past and to the myriad ways people adapt to crowding, anonymity and summer heat. Sze made "Blue Poles" during a yearlong residency at Alexander Calder's former studio in Sachet, France. Sze described her own work as related to Calder's in its focus on gravity and air and play. Some people thought this looked sketchy but we, The Biennial Project say that Blue Poles is The Pissa!!
Sarah must have been craving some jimmies from JP Licks and candle pin bowling because once again she took the Salt and Pepper Bridge ‘across The River’ to install ‘Model for Corner Plot’, Agassiz House, Radcliff Yard,Cambridge, MA.
This was Wicked Frickn’ mad
.
So don’t we know that Sarah loves that dirty water because last year she returned once again to Boston not only to root for Da Broons, but also to do a residency with The ICA with Trajai Harrell in which she produced The Untitled
Still Life Collection, a dynamic exchange between visual art and dance. This
was made possible by the Contemporary Art Centers (CAC) network administered
by the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA).
"