We welcome back 2008 Department of Art Alumna, Whitney Lea Sage. A native of suburban Detroit, Michigan, Sage is currently an Associate Professor of Art at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. In 2011, Sage earned her M.F.A. in Studio Art from the Sam Fox School of Visual Art at Washington University in St. Louis. At Miami University, she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art, Painting, and a Bachelor of Science in Art Education, both in 2008. Currently, her exhibition, Land/Marks of Home, is on view in the Hiestand Galleries, through December 5, 2025.
Land/Marks of Home, uses the language of drawing and painting to reflect upon themes of memory, destruction, homesickness and loss through the language of landscape and the home. Sage, a native of southeastern Michigan, focuses her meticulous attention on the rapidly disappearing homescapes and communities of the once-sprawling neighborhoods of Detroit and nearby Highland Park. While conditions of foreclosure, disenfranchisement and outmigration are being experienced in communities nationwide, the region has experienced unparalleled population loss and soaring home vacancy rates resulting in the demolition of tens of thousands of homes and thousands more still on the horizon. In Sage's work, the product of relentlessly culling through personal, community and institutional photographic source image archives, the rendered home façades serve as anthropomorphized placeholders, historical markers and memorials for the individuals and families that once occupied them. In Storming the Gates of Paradise, author Rebecca Solnit writes that “a city without ruins and traces of age is like a mind without memories." Through the language of the fragment and the void, Sage's work illuminates the failures of representation and memory to preserve the individual, familial and communal stories lost to cycles of urban decline or redevelopment. Through focusing on the familiar site of the home, Land/Marks of Home seeks to create open dialog about challenging and uncomfortable histories, to leverage empathy to examine the lenses through which communities view and represent one another and to ultimately knit together the fates of the viewer and the viewed through our shared protective impulses for the people and places we love.
Hannah Parrett will present a comprehensive lecture on their practice, expanding on her influences of ornamentation in architectural landscapes and utopian luxury in decorative objects. Covering subjects such as Art Nouveau, set design, science fiction, and horror, Parrett will unpack how these forms parallel her experience growing up in Western South Dakota in the early aughts, and the ways abstraction can be a tool to move beyond the boundaries of language.
