Whitney Lea Sage
Whitney Lea Sage is a multidisciplinary artist and educator originally from metro Detroit, currently serving as Assistant Professor of Art at North Central College in Naperville, IL. Whitney earned an MFA from the Sam Fox School of Visual Art at Washington University in St. Louis and Bachelor’s degrees in Studio Art: Painting and Art Education from Miami University.
Whitney’s work, which includes practices in painting, drawing, sculpture, fibers, and installation, has been featured in recent solo exhibitions at Buckham Gallery, the College of Southern Nevada, Indiana University East, Workhouse Arts Center, ROY G BIV, and Ripon College. A selection of Sage’s recent work has also been showcased in notable group exhibitions at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, the Painting Center, Superfront LA Gallery, the Lexington Art League, the Muskegon Museum of Art, the Kennedy Art Museum, and the Dennos Museum Center.
Whitney has participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Studios Midwest, AIR Studio Paducah, Wave Pool, Millimetre Press, and Popp’s Packing. Her creative work has been featured in numerous publications, including Manifest Gallery’s INDA 14, Refract Journal, Hour Detroit Magazine, WomanArts Quarterly Journal, Newfound Journal, Maake Magazine, and the Post-Industrial Complex catalog, published by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit as a survey of makers in the Detroit area.
For more information about Whitney and her work, visit www.whitneysage.com or follow her on Instagram at @wlsagestudio.
Artist Statement
The Homesickness Series, an ongoing body of acrylic ink drawings, focuses on the sprawling neighborhoods of Detroit and Highland Park, Michigan. Stylistically modeled after tintype photography, the work co-opts the visual iconography and traditions of landscape art for its ability to reflect the larger cultural ideals and shifts of its time.
Having grown up in suburban Detroit, I’ve witnessed firsthand the region’s bellwether relevance to the ways our nation’s post-industrial economy, geographic sprawl, and affinity for consumption continue to leave behind communities in its wake. Through the depiction of failing or absent architecture, the works address the many challenges facing urban and rural communities nationwide: the availability of safe, affordable housing; the maintenance of stable and dense neighborhoods; and the disappearance of recognizable homelands, along with the erasure of communal and familial histories.
Each work in this series presents Detroit and Highland Park’s endangered neighborhoods through the meticulous rendering of individual structures or lots within them. Each piece is the product of hours of close observation of source imagery and patient material layering. Over the past seven years, I’ve amassed an archive of hundreds of source photographs of abandoned homes, many of which are in significant danger of demolition. Since 2014, over 20,000 homes have been demolished in Detroit alone, with thousands more slated for demolition in the years ahead.
The focus on familiar middle-class archetypal homes across the series serves as an empathetic entry point for viewers to connect to the experiences of the individuals and families who once occupied each site. Through the incomplete picture provided by voided negative shapes and empty lots, and the expanding scale of the series, viewers are invited to consider the collective loss of identity, memory, and belonging these works represent. This is tied to our shared protective impulse for the people and places we love.
The physical removal of homes throughout Detroit and the harsh erasure of the home within my work represent the very real endangerment of accessible landmarks of communal memory and history. These works aim to document what exists, what’s disappearing, and what’s already unknown, asking viewers to reflect on what we’ve collectively lost as a result.
