October 16, 2026 - January 11, 2027
Sara Genn: How to Build a Sky
Curated by Louis Grachos
SITE SANTA FE
1606 Paseo De Peralta
Santa Fe, NM

Sara Genn distills the act of painting to its material core, wresting boundless variation from subtle distinctions of color, shape, texture, and touch. How to Build a Sky is the first solo institutional exhibition for the New York- and Palm Springs-based artist, featuring a suite of paintings that respond to SITE’s architectural frame and a mural commissioned for the building’s courtyard.

Genn invigorates traditions of geometric abstraction with her own signature technique, mixing custom pigments and rejecting hard edges in favor of what she calls “a defiant softness.” Poured acrylic absorbs into raw canvas to achieve a velvety saturation, and serpentine motifs provide roving pathways for the eye to travel. Genn’s crisp lines and contours appear somehow pre-ordained but are made entirely by hand — a re-centering of tactile, analog means in an increasingly mediated world.

Her latest paintings are tiered, multi-panel constructions that urge visual ricochets between stacked canvases. Together they produce “a vibratory encounter,” cohesive and enveloping. Each operates like a kind of color chart, aligning three custom blues that soak into the surface, overpainted with chalkier hues that round out the corners and pinstripe the centers. Genn’s svelte forms combine curved and rectilinear elements to “offer both visual shelter and excitement,” with hand-applied edgework that “feels like perfection but is actually proof of life.” Her modular arrangements forge cross-generational dialogues with various twentieth-century innovations, from Minimalism and Color Field painting to shaped canvases and seriality. Yet her technique ultimately elicits an emotional response, mining blue’s optical properties and its cultural associations, from serenity to grief. 

Outside, the mural’s gentle gradients of blue seamlessly give way to the surrounding sky. That ethereal precision harkens back to a long line of painters, from Georgia O’Keeffe to Agnes Martin: artists who, like Genn, moved to the American West and found their work transformed by the desert light. Here Genn extends her signature stretched ellipses of color to fill an existing wall, contrasting the tooth of the stuccoed support with the purity of the paint that coats it. The deepening shades draw the eye upward to take in the New Mexico sky; as the landscape painter John Constable said of his famous cloud studies, “the sky is the chief organ of sentiment . . . it governs everything.”

Genn’s larger project puts a pared-down roster of shapes in service of more fugitive experience. She calls her approach to painting “organizing color,” or “an effort to stabilize a mutable force—to play at ordering nature while embracing its mysteries.”

(Taylor Walsh for SITE SANTA FE, Autumn, 2026)