Sara Holt (artist)

Sara Holt
Sara Holt in her studio, Paris, 2014
Born	(1946-03-14)14 March 1946 Los Angeles, California
Nationality	American
Known for	Sculpture, photography, ceramics

Sara Holt (born 1946) is an American sculptor and photographer. She is creating mainly in sculpture and photography and more recently in ceramics. She is one of the contemporary artists whose work helps to refine the field of creation situated within the boundaries of science and art.

Holt graduated from the University of Colorado with a BFA in 1968. She was an artist in residence at la Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris from 1969 to 1971. She lives and works in Paris since 1969.

Her scientific and artistic household and the family house built by architect Irving Gill (where she lived from age six to eighteen) influence her work to varying degrees. After graduating from the University of Colorado, Holt traveled in Europe and decided to prolong her stay in France. She developed new artistic techniques while combining her inherent nature of the media—the casting of resin, glazing of ceramics, the process of photography itself—and very constructed, layered or planned objects. Holt took advantage of the freedom and excitement of the sixties not only from a technical point of view, but also to merge her seemingly contrasting centers of interest and avenues of exploration: use of light and transparency with the resin sculpture and light tubes, as opposed to photographing in the dark, or using and letting chance operate within the artistic framework. Her ability to explore the vital elements of nature (light, color, earth, space and time) while maintaining a spiritual, poetical and organic quality place Sara Holt’s body of work at the crossroads of science and art.

During the fall of 1968, she met Piotr Kowalski. In the spring of 1969 she obtained a studio at the Cité International des Arts in Paris, where she continued to cast resin, and she met artists and critics including Erró, Alain Jouffroy, Frank Popper and Aline Dallier and, later, James Lee Byars, Henri-Alexis Baatsh (), Jean-Christophe Bailly, Meret Oppenheim and Joan Mitchell. Official recognition crystallized when Pierre Gaudibert organized her first individual exhibition at l’ARC (Paris, 1971), a prestigious venue for contemporary art. The exhibition included « Little Rainbow Snakes », a 2-meter Cone, some large spheres, two large « Lenses » with resin spheres cast inside, a big Rainbow Snake, and several tear drop shaped prisms : all polyester resin work.