Sage Dawson

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.

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 is drawn to analog approaches to technology and explores processes 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, forming a bridge between traditional craft and digital literacy.

Sage is currently the Co-Director of STNDRD (Granite City, Illinois)—a public art project examining the power and potential of flags—and NON STNDRD (Sauget, Illinois), two adjacent exhibition spaces on the National Building Arts Center campus that formerly served as steel casting sand bunkers. Both projects are nestled in Illinois company towns along the Mississippi River, and centered within de-centered landscapes. She completed an MFA with a Museum Studies minor from the University of New Mexico, and a BFA from Missouri State University.

Sage has also curated exhibitions at The Luminary (St. Louis), Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles), ACRE Projects (Steuben, Wisconsin), and the Terrain Biennial (Springfield, Illinois). Sage has exhibited, lectured, and presented work at numerous sites, including the Center for Contemporary Printmaking (Norwalk), the NARS Foundation, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts/Printed Matter, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Tate Exchange, Minnesota Center for Books Arts, the City University of New York, the Counterpublic Triennial, and the International Print Center New York, among many others.

Sage is a recipient of the Futures Fund regranting initiative (supported by The Luminary and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts) and the Creative Stimulus Award from Critical Mass for the Visual Arts St. Louis. She is a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant Nominee and a recipient of a Research Travel Grant from the Mid America Print Council. She has completed residencies at ACRE, Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, Zygote Press, The Luminary, and Vermont Studio Center, and was awarded the Denbo Fellowship at Pyramid Atlantic.

Her work has appeared in Art in America, Elephant Magazine, Dwell Magazine, Hyperallergic, and was featured in From Here to There, published by Princeton Architectural Press.