Office Hours
By Appointment
Education
MFA, Michigan State University
BA, University of Sioux Falls
About Me
Sarah Odens is an artist, curator, and assistant professor and coordinator of exhibitions and lectures at Auburn University. She received her MFA with a concentration in painting from Michigan State University (2015), and her BA in art and English from the University of Sioux Falls in Sioux Falls, SD (2012). After completing her MFA, she returned to Sioux Falls for a position as the assistant curator of the Washington Pavilion Visual Arts Center, where she supervised docents and educational programming and was involved in mounting more than 45 exhibitions. In 2017, Odens was appointed curator of the Visual Arts Center where she curated more than 25 exhibitions.
In her creative research, Odens explores social media images and New Domesticity; her paintings transform images of domestic perfection into abstracted musings on the joy and the futility of chasing that very perfection. Her uneasy fascination with online domesticity—often false, rigid, staged, or idealized—permeates her paintings and speaks to the rough, undone edges of crumbling cakes and the dissolving fragments of floral arrangements. Odens has exhibited her work throughout the Midwest at venues including the Sioux Falls Arts Council, and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, MI.
Research Interests
social media, New Domesticity