FRAMES Photography Podcast with Sarah Sense

In today’s episode, W. Scott Olsen speaks with Sarah Sense, a Chitimacha and Choctaw artist known for weaving her photographs into traditional basket patterns, blending image, memory, and Indigenous history into powerful visual narratives.

Her work was published in the 18th edition of FRAMES Magazine.

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Sarah Sense is an artist from Sacramento, California (1980). She received a BFA from California State University Chico (2003), and an MFA from Parsons the New School for Design, New York (2005). Sense was the curator/director of the American Indian Community House Gallery (2005-07) where she catalogued the gallery’s thirty-year history.

Sense has been practicing photo-weaving with traditional basket techniques from her Chitimacha and Choctaw family since 2004. Early works are based on Chitimacha landscape in Louisiana and Hollywood interpretations of Native North America. Sense moved to South America in 2010 for research, her work changed to include travels journals, landscape photography and family archives, telling stories to reveal Indigenous histories, most notably her field search of Native art from twelve countries in the Western Hemisphere, for the book and exhibition, Weaving the Americas in Valdivia and Santiago, Chile (2011).

Sense traveled to Southeast Asia and the Caribbean for, Weaving Water debuting in Bristol, England (2013). While living in Ireland she collaborated with her Choctaw grandmother for Grandmother’s Stories at AHHA in Tulsa, Oklahoma (2015), followed by works about family lines and motherhood for Remember at the World Cultures Museum in Frankfurt, Germany (2016). Sense continues her research as a British Library Eccles Centre Fellow and recently installed a sculpture at the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth, England. Her most recent commissions for Florida State University (2021) and Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth (2022) are large wall weaving of maps and documents from the British Library archive. The new map and landscape weavings are focusing on colonial impacts on climate, with purpose to conceptually reinstate Indigeneity with traditional weaving patterns while decolonizing colonial maps.