Visual Arts Fellow Sara Stern Opens Solo Exhibition at Turley Gallery
Sara Stern ’17, ‘STALL,’ (Installation view. Site-specific installation with single-channel video (color/sound), custom toy theater, adorned horseshoe crab shell, straw hay, velvet curtain. Dimensions Variable, 14:22 min, looped. 2025) Image courtesy of Sara Stern and TURLEY.
Visual Arts Fellow and Columbia alum Sara Stern has her fifth solo exhibition, STALL, on display at Turley Gallery in Hudson, New York. The mise en abyme installation creates a horseshoe crab theater out of a horse stall in Turley Gallery’s interstitial venue, The Light Wall. STALL runs from July 19 to September 7, 2025.
The exhibition’s name is a play on words, referring both to the invented horse stall setting for Stern’s dioramas and the act of purposeful delay. The diorama, set in hay, uses red theater curtains to frame an art object and a video documenting the recreation of horseshoe crabs. In the image-within-an-installation, the audience encounters a toy horseshoe crab watching the origin of its species.
“This is a show as old as the dinosaurs,” Turley Gallery said. “The horseshoe crab, often referred to as a ‘living fossil,’ is among the oldest species on Earth. By stalling, the horseshoe crab survived.”
Sara Stern is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. Her recent projects prod varied histories of landscape and urban development with speculative fiction. She works between and across multimedia performance, moving image installation, sculpture, architectural intervention, and animation.
Stern has exhibited and screened her work in the US and internationally, at venues including SculptureCenter, Essex Flowers, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Anthology Film Archives, the Museum of the Moving Image, and The Jewish Museum in New York City, as well as Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. Stern received a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. She is the recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, the Fountainhead Fellowship in the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University, and several residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. In recent years, Stern has participated in The Watermill Center Artist Residency Program, the Fire Island Artist Residency, the Art & Law Program, the Object Movement Residency at The Center at West Park, all in New York State, and the Artist Residency at the Carving Studio and Sculpture Center, in Rutland, Vermont.
