Sage Dawson’s work looks at how housing and labor shape American cities. Over the past decade, she has explored local history through the built environment, focusing on the material origins of brick, limestone, and cast iron within vernacular architecture. Working at the intersection of printmaking, archival research, and material activism, Dawson’s work often embeds directly into the urban landscape as architecturally responsive works that comment on our ever-shifting politics of space, shedding light on the systematic erasure of local architecture and making visible the deep connections between our physical surroundings and our daily lives.
More recently, her work has shifted toward understanding domestic labor in the Midwest during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By connecting textiles with labor history and urban studies, Dawson brings stories out of archival storage and into public conversation. She’s drawn to analog approaches to technology, and explores making that typify historic domestic labor: banner-making, needlepoint, open-work, patterning, and stitching. She also uses repeating, multi-layered printing blocks to build layered textiles that bridge analog and digital technologies. In her prints, digital tools blend with traditional hand-carving without losing their distinct, handmade mark. Dawson plays with the shared grid patterns of the computer screen, the silkscreen, and the weaving loom, where each relies on a base structure—code, mesh, or warp—to organize information. This back-and-forth cycle between analog and digital explores the tension and common ground between handmade and digital marks and forms a bridges between traditional craft and digital literacy.
Sage is currently the Co-Director at STNDRD (Granite City, Illinois) and NON STNDRD (Sauget, Illinois). She has curated exhibitions at The Luminary, Loyola Marymount University, ACRE Projects, the Terrain Biennial, and Dalton Warehouse. Sage is a Senior Lecturer and Foundations Coordinator in the College of Art at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University, St. Louis.
Sage has exhibited, lectured, and presented work at various sites including the Center for Contemporary Printmaking Norwalk, NARS Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space/Printed Matter, Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Chicago Artists Coalition, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Ortega y Gasset (Brooklyn), Tate Exchange, Boston University School of Visual Arts, Terrain Biennial, Practise (Chicago), Super Duchess (New York), Laumeier Sculpture Park, Springfield Art Museum, The Luminary, City University of New York, Counterpublic Triennial, University of Pennsylvania, Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Work • Detroit, and International Print Center New York.
Sage is a recipient of grants from the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis, Mid America Print Council, Critical Mass St Louis, and the Futures Fund supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation and regranted by The Luminary. She is also a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant Nominee and recipient of the Paris Studio at the Cité International Des Arts in Paris. She has completed residencies at ACRE, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Zygote Press, the Luminary, and Vermont Studio Center. She was awarded the Denbo Fellowship at Pyramid Atlantic, and has previously worked in collaboration at the Tamarind Institute.
Her work has appeared in Art in America, Elephant Magazine, From Here to There published by Princeton Architectural Press, New Art Examiner, New City Art, Saint Louis Public Radio, 60 Wrd/Min Art Critic, Art in Print, Dwell Magazine, and Hyperallergic.