Shuli Sadé

New York multi disciplinary artist Shuli Sadé specializes in installation, photography, and video, working with ethereal elements of light, sound, movement, and arrested images, which involve her viewers in the work which recognizes their physical presence within the display. Her investigations into time and memory led to a recent collaboration with neuroscientist, Dr. Andre A. Fenton, and the creation of a permanent art installation for the Neurobiology of Cognition Laboratory at NYU (2010-2012). She also worked with Dr. Dorita Hannah on photographs for a book chapter for Eating Architecture (MIT Press, 2004) and with neuroscientists at the Weitzman Institute, developing an art project (2011-2012). She often collaborates with architects on site-specific art and architectural photography.

Sadé has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts Emergency Grant, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Fund, NY-Israel Cultural Cooperation Commission grant, AICF study grant, and NY Art Development Committee grants. Her recent NYU installation was selected among Top 100 best art projects in Collaboration of Design and Art awards (CoD+A Top 100, 2013).

Shuli was born in Israel and moved to NY in 1984. With a BFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design and postgraduate work at NY’s School of Visual Arts, she has taught and lectured at the University of Pennsylvania School of Architecture, Parsons School of Design, Columbia University’s Barnard College, SUNY Old Westbury Art Department, and Bezalel Academy of Art and Design School of Architecture. Her work is in numerous private and public collections in the USA and abroad.

1) What or who inspired you to want to be an artist?
Nature. It made me aware of my senses from early on. I was born in an incredibly green and lush farm in northern Israel, and was eight years of age when I discovered the magic of painting and art making.

2) What was your creative journey that has brought you to where you are in your career today?
Shortly after realizing I could paint and draw, I started taking art classes, followed by my studies at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and the School of Visual Arts in NY. I was mainly a painter when I begun my art journey, but with time I acquired skills in other media in order to have a greater freedom in translating my ideas. On my second year at Bezalel I added photography and video studies to the already existing painting, drawing, sculpture, and printing techniques. By the fourth year I made installations and became a multi disciplinary artist. Working with architects had taught me how to see space. Working with neuroscientists informs me of the way our brain functions when it traces memory. Consciously or unconsciously, I use this information to create new work.

3) What do you need as an artist today?
I need an audience, collectors (returning and new), venues to expose my work, and financial support. Collectors buy ready work, while investors are able to support my vision leading to an art piece or a show.

4) What creative project are you working on now?
Following my ongoing experiments with encoded memory, I work on an installation made of photographs, drawings, sculpture, and video. Grid Signals are a set of colossal drawing-like photographic images, the remains of decoded photographs of urban settings shot from the New York Times building in Manhattan during nighttime. These urban manuscripts form ghostly texts as overwritten, erased, and retrieved images that collapse time, eradicating transforming and rebuilding space. The geometry of missing particles unveils a grid of architectural rhythms that belong to large modern cities. Removing photographic information with a mechanical precision creates a new landscape, constructed from lost evidence within an existing landscape. Through New York City’s familiar architecture and urbanism, The Engram drawings, Urban Scrolls, freestanding photo- sculpture, and Grid Signal video pieces re-define the notion of memory retrieval.

5) Where do you see yourself and your career in 10 years?
I will continue working on topics that reflect my ongoing research. I will initiate new collaborations with scientists, and I believe that the work will be extensively exposed and shared.

6) What does it mean to you to be an Israeli artist?
Israeli, artist, woman, New Yorker, nature-loving spiritual being are all part of who I am. I am grateful for the opportunity to identify myself with all. I am equally interested in exhibiting my work in both Israel and NY.

7) What does it mean to you to have an organization like AICF available in the art world?
It is immensely important to have organizations like AICF supportive of the arts. Artists need this kind of support to enable the creative process. The world needs more supportive organizations, particularly for individual artists. Personally, I would not have been able to study at the School of Visual Arts without AICF support. In perspective, it opened a new window for both my art carrier and my life.

Shuli Sadé