Sari Dienes: Night Eyes

Sari Dienes

Night Eyes

February 4—March 21, 2026

“No Matter What I Touch I Transform” Sari Dienes’s Metamorphoses

MICHELLE DONNELLY

In a 1970 photograph by Peter Moore, Sari Dienes stands barefoot atop a sheet of canvas that covers the width of a New York City sidewalk. She bends her body at a dynamic angle with her head down, legs straight, and arm extended, passing an inked brayer, or a handheld roller, across the surface. The stretch of canvas before her displays layered markings. Created from the application of pressure from the movement of her tool and the counterpressure of the ground, these markings reveal the gritty texture of the urban terrain beneath. In the foreground, two male assistants frame the scene, respectively standing and kneeling beside a palette. As one gives the other a brayer, their hands meet directly below Dienes’s own, emphasizing her contact with the pavement. With the support of her colleagues, and in the view of curious passersby, Dienes transforms the mundane matter of a city walkway into an abstract work of art.1

Moore’s photograph encapsulates Dienes’s commitments as an artist: material experimentation, a haptic engagement with the external world, and the transmutation of found forms. “No matter what I touch I transform,” Dienes reflected. “I do things in my own way. I deal with different kinds of materials because there’s no limitation. Life is my subject matter.”2 While Dienes embraced a wide range of mediums, tools, and processes throughout her career, she consistently turned to her immediate surroundings for aesthetic inspiration. She reclaimed and recontextualized elements that held histories on their surfaces, from seashells and tree trunks to maintenance hole covers and tombstones to glass bottles and shattered mirrors. Enacting an expansive approach to artmaking, she saw metamorphic potential in the everyday, the overlooked, and the discarded.

Dienes’s interest in the transfiguration of common matter has roots in her early artistic training. Born in Debrecen, Hungary in 1898, Dienes pursued an art education around the age of twenty-six. Beginning in

I wish to express my gratitude to Barbara Pollitt and Rip Hayman at the Sari Dienes Foundation for their ongoing generosity. My thanks as well to Jennifer Raab and Kim Conaty for their long-term support of my research on Dienes and to Alex Fialho and Kevin Hong for their feedback on a draft of this essay.

1. In Peter Moore’s photographs, Sari Dienes is seen creating several colorful, large-scale rubbings in front of Cedar Tavern, including Autumn (1970) and Spring (1970).

2. Sari Dienes, in Hats, Bottles, & Bones: A Portrait of Sari Dienes, directed by Martha Edelheit, 1977, Sari Dienes Foundation Archive (hereafter SDFA).

1924, she took courses at the Académie Moderne in Paris with Purist and Cubist painters Fernand Léger, Amédée Ozenfant, and André Lhote.3 There, she sought to hone her drawing skills and understanding of anatomy.4 She followed Ozenfant to the Académie Ozenfant in 1932 and then became the assistant director of the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts in London in 1936. She studied clay sculpture with Henry Moore and became acquainted with Surrealists, recruiting students Leonora Carrington and Stella

3. The dates of Dienes’s study at the Académie Moderne are inconsistent in scholarship, and the artist was imprecise with dates. Barbara Pollitt at the Sari Dienes Foundation has dated Dienes as beginning studies there in 1924 based on surviving primary sources.

4. Sari Dienes, interview with Donna Marxer, March 4, 1989, 6, in SDFA; Robert Berlind, “Sari Dienes,” Art Journal 53, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 38.

Snead and cultivating a friendship with Max Ernst.5 Shells (pl. 17) demonstrates Dienes’s academic training and growing interest in the psychology of form.

Two organic objects float against a luminous setting evocative of a landscape through its horizontal gradations of rustic brown, pale yellow, pastel pink, and cornflower blue. The contours of the shells are solidly rendered, their surfaces smoothly modeled and edges encrusted with paint. Yet they appear weightless, untethered to the earth. The shell on the left resembles a human figure with a raised head and erect body. Bringing her study of the nude to bear on a still life of

5. Sari Dienes, “Report for Committee on Admissions,” 1953, in Folder 20, Box 241, Yaddo Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library (hereafter NYPL); Dienes, interview with Marxer, 9; Sari Dienes: A Life in Art, directed by Barbara Pollitt, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r3KlwHcXHE.

Leonora Carrington, Personajes del Teatro, 1941, oil on canvas, 24 × 17 7/8 in. Courtesy of Sotheby’s. © 2026 Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

gathered objects, Dienes infused nature with a sense of animacy.

Dienes continued to paint enigmatic scenes of humble objects after her arrival in Manhattan in the fall of 1939. At Ozenfant’s invitation, she had intended to stay for only a few months, but the outbreak of World War II prevented her return to England; 6 she settled in the United States for the rest of her life, becoming a citizen in 1954. During the 1940s, as she was making a home in New York, her work grew more abstract. In Trunk and Rocks (pl. 18), an assortment of simplified, biomorphic shapes hovers against a solid blue background. Refusing the conventions of linear perspective, Dienes pushed the subjects to the

6. Dienes, interview with Marxer, 6–7; Sari Dienes, with M. C. Richards, “Sari Dienes: Unconventional Use of Print Techniques,” Craft Horizons XVI, no. 2 (April 1956): 36.

front of the picture plane in a formalist interplay of positive and negative space. As the decade wore on, she continued to depart from veristic representation. Under the influence of Abstract Expressionism, her paint handling became looser, no longer reliant on the direct study of nature.

The major shift in Dienes’s practice occurred in 1953 at the Yaddo artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she left the confines of her studio to engage with the surrounding environment.7 Prior to her Yaddo residency, she had trained in intaglio printmaking at the New York workshop Atelier 17 from

7. Although Dienes declared that her Yaddo residency took place in spring 1952, archival documents confirm that it occurred from May 1 to June 28, 1953. For Dienes’s misdating, see Dienes, “Unconventional Use of Print Techniques,” 37. For evidence of the dates of her residency, see Elizabeth Ames to Sari Dienes, April 2, 1953, in Folder 20, Box 241, Yaddo Records, NYPL.

Max Ernst, The Fascinating Cypress (Le fascinant cyprès), 1925, graphite frottage on paper, 8 3/4 × 6 3/4 in. The Menil Collection, Houston, 1978-076

E. Photograph by Paul Hester. Artwork © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

1949 to 1953.8 Under the guidance of Stanley William Hayter, she had produced unique monoprints from heavily worked copper plates.9 Inspired by this experience, Dienes brought printmaking supplies—a brayer and oil-based printing ink—to Yaddo.10 But instead of engraving or etching an image into a metal sheet, she scoured the terrain for readymade textures from which to generate impressions. Initially, she inked and hand-printed pieces of found wood in her studio.11 Soon, though, she began to produce rubbings directly

8. Dienes, “Report for Committee on Admissions.”

9. Christina Weyl, The Women of Atelier 17: Modernist Printmaking in Midcentury New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 222.

10. As Dienes stated, “my work in graphics was of great help to me.” Dienes, “Unconventional Use of Print Techniques,” 36. In traditional printmaking, a brayer is used to apply an even layer of ink to the printing surface, typically a metal plate or a woodblock.

11. Dienes, “Unconventional Use of Print Techniques,” 37.

in the landscape: “I started taking my materials out into the woods, taking prints of birch trees, of the stone threshold of my studio; and inside as well, using everything. Putting under my scroll the grasses and flowers I had gathered and running the roller over them. I was enraptured by the textures and unexpected images that rose through.”12 Dienes simultaneously used the brayer as an ink applicator and a handheld press to create direct, positive impressions of the organic matter beneath her “scroll” of paper or fabric. During a period in which critics privileged the studio as a site of artistic genius, she boldly ventured beyond its walls in search of tactile subjects.

At Yaddo, Dienes embraced rubbing not as a means of factual documentation but as “a kind of

12. Ibid.

jumping off place for my imagination.”13 From her friendship with Ernst, she was familiar with the history of Surrealists who had used rubbing to generate fantastical compositions in the early twentieth century. In their frottages, which combined rubbings from multiple surfaces, a leaf became the wing of a dragonfly, a wooden floor became a pasture, a piece of thread became a river, the backbone of a fish became a tree. Dienes built on this legacy by placing disparate elements of the Yaddo property into new relationships on her supports. To create The Moons of Yaddo, she printed the side of a wooden staircase beneath two impressions of a tree trunk. Through their positioning on the sheet, the trunks resemble moons that hang above a mountain range. Unconcerned with creating one-to-one replications of the landscape as she encountered it, Dienes deployed rubbing as an act of metamorphosis.

Upon returning to New York, Dienes expanded her rubbing technique, which she came to call “surface printing.”14 Equipped with a brayer and rolls of paper, canvas, or Webril (a non-woven cloth manufactured for the medical industries), she captured mesmerizing impressions of subway grates, perforated steel panels, cast-iron drain covers, and pavement cracks.15 She preferred to venture into the streets late at night—around three to five a.m. on Sundays when traffic was quiet and pedestrians were few. Working at a larger scale than at Yaddo, she frequently enlisted colleagues—including Jasper Johns, Robert

13. Ibid.

14. Dienes’s definition of “surface printing” changed over time. Initially, she used the term to describe a process in which she inked a surface, placed a support over it, and made an impression by applying pressure with a spoon. Dienes, “Unconventional Use of Print Techniques,” 37. Soon, however, Dienes shifted to using “surface printing” to describe the act of placing a support over a surface and applying an inked roller to the support to create an impression. See Mark Hedden, “Petroglyphs,” Craft Horizons XVII, no. 5 (October 1957): 29; and Mark Hedden, “‘Surface Printing’ as a Means of Recording Petroglyphs,” American Antiquity 23, no. 4 (April 1958): 435.

15. “‘Impossible’ Cotton Felt Developed by Walpole Mill,” Berkshire Evening Eagle, July 16, 1949, 2.

Sari Dienes creating her tombstone rubbings in Trinity Churchyard, Lower Manhattan, 1954. Walter Sanders/The LIFE Picture Collection/ Shutterstock.

Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, John Cage, and Rachel Rosenthal—to hold down her unwieldy supports and then roll them up before the wind blew them away.16 Back in her 57th Street studio, Dienes continued to manipulate her rubbed forms with an arsenal of tools: brushes, rags, spray guns, blowers, sponges, vacuum cleaners, and fingers.17 Through constant experimentation, she radically transformed the urban surfaces she traversed daily.

Presenting recognizable imagery from the ground on vertical supports, Dienes’s sidewalk rubbings are visually and conceptually disorienting. In Street Mix (pl. 23), the rounded structure and linear pattern identifiably derive from a maintenance hole cover. However, as art historian Kate Zeller has argued, when hung on a wall, this motif becomes a portal for passage through, rather than below—an entrance to a tunnel, rather than a gateway to subterranean depths.18 Other works deploy titling to bring forth imagery unrelated to the artist’s source, similar to The Moons of Yaddo. Near the top center of Sidewalk Sun (pl. 13), Dienes applied a burst of red, orange, and yellow ink. The title suggests that this ambiguous shape is a sun, transforming the scene into a landscape.19 The crease that cuts across the composition one-third of the way down, produced from the groove between two cement panels, metamorphoses into a horizon, while the thick, calligraphic fissures above it become clouds. Under her roller, the urban terrain assumed new material and aesthetic forms, mutating from rigid cement to pliable fiber, from flat surface to illusionistic picture.

16. John Wilcock, “Boulevard Beachcomber,” Village Voice, February 15, 1956; Rachel Rosenthal, in Sari Dienes: A Life in Art.

17. Dienes, “Unconventional Use of Print Techniques,” 37–38; Untitled document, n.d., in Folder 40, Box 4, Series 1, Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter AAA).

18. Kate Zeller, “Making Her Mark: Sari Dienes and Her Street Rubbings in 1950s New York” (MA thesis, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2008), 53.

19. As Dienes argued, “Nature is evoked as well by non-nature.” Dienes, “Unconventional Use of Print Techniques,” 38.

Exhibition venues further shaped the meaning of Dienes’s subject matter. Whereas Betty Parsons Gallery (1954) framed her sidewalk rubbings in relation to abstract painting, The Contemporaries Gallery (1959) emphasized their connections to printmaking.20 But perhaps most surprisingly, Bonwit Teller’s department store juxtaposed Dienes’s works with the latest trends in women’s fashion.21

As documented in a photograph by Virginia Roehl, Dienes’s street rubbings hung behind a mannequin, the circular patterning of the cast-iron and glass vault lights echoed in the polka-dot design of the figure’s dress. This visual play continued in another Bonwit Teller display the next year that included Dienes’s plaster collages. Inspired by the experimentation with plaster printing at Atelier 17, Dienes crafted irregularly shaped plaster wall reliefs.22 She embedded a variety of materials into the still-wet surface—rope, wood, shells, pebbles, bark, sand, even fragments of copper printing plates—and left behind impressions of cloth and mesh.23 In the department store window, the rustic palette and metallic surfaces of Dienes’s collages were echoed in the white and glittering gold outfit worn by the mannequin. Placed in the context of commercial fashion, her works became jewel-like accoutrements, transformed from the detritus of the print shop and the streets.

20. Untitled document, c. 1954, in Folder 40, Box 4, Series 1, Betty Parsons Gallery Records, AAA. The Contemporaries was founded as a hybrid printmaking workshop and gallery. See Lauren Rosenblum and Christina Weyl, eds., A Model Workshop: Margaret Lowengrund and The Contemporaries (New York: Print Center New York and Hirmer Publishers, 2023).

21. While scholars have often credited Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg for the installation of Dienes’s works at Bonwit Teller, Johns has clarified that he and Rauschenberg were not involved. Jasper Johns, email to Barbara Pollitt, February 13, 2023. My thanks to Barbara Pollitt for sharing this correspondence with me.

22. Lisa Conte, Emily Jenne, and Lucia Elledge, “(Re)Constructing the Plaster Print: Tracing an Elusive History,” paper presented at the online workshop Atelier 17 at 100, September 4, 2024.

23. My thanks to Jennifer Samet for pointing out the fragment of a copper printing plate at the bottom of Monoprint #3 (1950).

Dienes creating her petroglyph rubbing Night Eyes in The Dalles Reservoir, Columbia River, 1956. Photograph by Mark Hedden.

Sari Dienes creating a petroglyph rubbing in The Dalles Reservoir, Columbia River, 1956. Photograph by Mark Hedden.

While Dienes used surface printing to reconfigure the grounds of New York, she also sought to preserve cultural heritage. After a Life magazine article highlighted her memorialization of eighteenth-century tombstones, settler archaeologist Mark Hedden invited Dienes to “salvage” over 350 Indigenous petroglyphs along the Columbia River in 1956.24

Created as far back as 8,000 years ago on the ancestral homelands of the Wishram Tribe,

24. “Tombstone Tracery: Artist Records Shadowy Images of Cemetery Art,” Life, November 15, 1954; Hedden, “Petroglyphs,” 28–31; Hedden, “Surface Printing,” 435–39. For an analysis of Dienes’s petroglyph rubbings in the context of the ancestral homelands of the Wishram Tribe, histories of settler-colonial salvage, and capitalist extraction in the Columbia River Gorge, see the second chapter of my dissertation, Michelle Donnelly, “Outside the Workshop: Alternative Spaces of U.S. Printmaking, 1935–1977” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2025), 79–119.

these rock carvings were going to submerge under the floodwaters of The Dalles Dam in March 1957. With funds from the University of Washington and the National Park Service, Dienes produced two sets of impressions: one in black and white ink for the University of Washington (now in the collection of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, Seattle, WA) and one in a wide array of colors for her own collection (pl. 15, pl. 19).25 To make Night Eyes (pl. 14), Dienes rolled the brayer against a piece of burlap, which Hedden had taped to a rockface, in three passings of red, blue, and black. Pairs of concentric

25. Mark Hedden, interview by Gerard Forde, James Monroe, and Barbara Pollitt, 2013, part 1, SDFA, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=7ZcFCVUatAs; Duane Mason, “Indian Figures Lifted from Rocks,” Dalles Chronicle, November 10, 1956, 7; James Britton, “Of Rock and Roll,” San Diego & Point Magazine, April 1957, 38.

forms rose beneath her tool, punctuating each of the four corners of the composition. These bold, circular motifs signify deep grooves in the basalt; the Wishrams or their neighbors had abraded the smooth, hard façade with pointed stone tools and continually renewed the designs as they weathered.26

Through direct contact with surfaces shaped and reshaped over countless generations, Night Eyes and Dienes’s related works contain traces of living histories.

From the Columbia River, Dienes brought surface printing to Japan, where she cultivated her interest in Zen Buddhism, mokuhanga (woodblock printing), and 26. Hedden, “Petroglyphs,” 31.

ceramics from 1957 to 1958.27 She had first encountered Zen doctrine around 1941 when she read Alan Watts’s The Spirit of Zen. 28 Alongside Cage and other artists, she deepened her understanding of the East Asian religion at seminars taught by D.T. Suzuki at Columbia University.29 For Dienes, Zen embodied her belief that there is no hierarchy among things: “All the forces that are working in nature are alive. We make the distinction between something that is seemingly rigid (a stone) and something that seemingly moves (a

27. Joan Arbeiter, “Chance and Change in the Art of Sari Dienes,” Woman’s Art Journal 7, no. 2 (Autumn 1986–Winter 1987): 27–31, 29; Myrna Tarkan, “Glass – In the Hands of the Artist a Medium for Expression,” The County Citizen, December 13, 1962, 20.

28. Alan Watts, The Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work and Art in the Far East (London: J. Murray, 1936).

29. Arbeiter, “Chance and Change,” 28–29; Berlind, “Sari Dienes,” 38–39; Dienes, interview with Marxer, 15.

person). Everything has a mind, spirit, intelligence.”30 Attuned to the lifeforce in all objects, she impressed an uncarved plank of wood in Kyoto No. 3 (pl. 3). From her study of mokuhanga, she would have been particularly attentive to the texture of wood at this time, as she learned how the direction and coarseness of the grain affected the quality of cuts into the block. But instead of selecting fine-grained cherrywood, the preferred printing surface in mokuhanga, Dienes selected a wood with vigorous, rippling patterns.31 An encapsulation of Zen principles as she understood

30. Sari Dienes, “Notes on Japan,” It Is 4 (1959): 63.

31. Donald Saff and Deli Sacilotto, Printmaking: History and Process (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978), 38–39.

them, Kyoto No. 3 conveys the inner vitality of the external world.

Dienes’s respect for the inherent qualities of modest materials inspired her to create not only surface prints and plaster reliefs but also three-dimensional assemblages. By 1956, she began the series Bottle Gardens, composed of glass vessels affixed by epoxy resin.32 Blue Bulb (pl. 12) presents an assortment of jugs, bottles, canisters, and light bulbs stacked in a delicate balance. While the title may seem literal—identifying the predominant color and shape in the grouping—it simultaneously conjures

32. M. C. Richards, “The Bottle Gardens of Sari Dienes,” Craft Horizons XXII, no. 5 (September/October 1962): 25.

an underground stem with the capacity to grow and sprout. Transformed from used bottles into a non-utilitarian sculpture, Blue Bulb evokes the renewal and regeneration of matter.

In contrast to the vessels of Bottle Gardens, which she predominantly kept intact, Dienes deconstructed and reconstructed fragments in what she called Brokages (a play on “collage” and “broken”).33 One such work, Eyes (pl. 25), is a box construction of shattered pieces of a mirror. Long, arching cracks erupt

33. Sari Dienes, in I am a Maker, directed by Joan Guimmo, in SDFA, quoted in Sid Sachs, “Sari Dienes: Don’t You Know Who I Am?!,“ in Sari Dienes: Who I Am?!, Commentaries on Her Life and Art, ed. Barbara Pollitt (Pomona, NY: Sari Dienes Foundation Inc., 2022), 62.

from a single point against the back wall, splintering in a variety of directions. These forms, though, were not made by chance. As Dienes explained in an interview, “When a mirror falls down or gets broken, it always breaks in straight lines except if it breaks with heat, then it makes these wonderful curves.”34 To achieve the winding fissures in Eyes, she skillfully used a blowtorch. Deliberately fractured, the kaleidoscopic surface reflects, bends, and multiplies its surroundings. Through a mutated looking glass, Dienes reimagined her familiar environment anew.

Dienes, interview with Marxer, 20–21.

After moving to an artist’s community in Stony Point, New York in 1961, where she would live until her passing in 1992, Dienes expanded her material repertoire to include animal bones, lint, coffee filters, snow, Styrofoam, flower petals, hat blocks, and mushrooms. As she stated, “nothing is so humble that it cannot be made into art.”35 Whether working in painting, rubbing, or assemblage, Dienes transformed the physical world. She sought and gathered, impressed and reconstructed all kinds of matter, manifesting novel visual and material relationships. In her hands, objects and surfaces underwent a range of metamorphoses that reveal the hidden in the mundane. ◾

35. Sari Dienes, quoted in Roberta Smith, “Sari Dienes, 93, Artist Devoted to the Value of the Found Object,” New York Times, May 28, 1992, 22, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/28/arts/ sari-dienes-93-artist-devoted-to-the-value-of-the-found-object. html. Originally quoted in Creativity with Bill Moyers, season 1, episode 6, “Garbage: Another Way of Seeing,” directed by David Grubin and Sidney Smith, featuring Bill Moyers and Sari Dienes, aired April 2, 1982.

MICHELLE DONNELLY is the Evelyn and Will Kaplan Curator of Twentieth Century Art and the John Rhoden Collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia. A specialist in histories of printmaking, she devoted a chapter of her doctoral dissertation to Sari Dienes’s “surface prints,” or rubbings. She earned a PhD in the History of Art from Yale University, an MA in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in Art History with Honors from Vassar College.

The Exhibition

5 Monoprint #3, 1950 ink and copper on plaster 18 1/2 × 16 1/2 in. (detail follows)

6 Untitled, 1950 rope,

30

opposite)

(detail opposite)

Sari Dienes

b. 1898, Debrecen, Hungary

d. 1992, Stony Point, New York

EDUCATION

1935 Académie Ozenfant

1928 Académie Moderne

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2023 Sari Dienes: Incidental Nature, Boca Raton Museum, FL

Sari Dienes, Garner Art Center, Garnerville, NY

2021 Sari Dienes, The Philadelphia Art Alliance at University of the Arts, PA

2019 Sari Dienes: Atmospheric Changes, Pavel Zoubok Fine Art, New York, NY

2015 Sari Dienes, RARE Gallery, Glenn Horowitz Booksellers, New York, NY

2014 The Spirit Lives In Everything, Pavel Zoubok Fine Art, New York, NY

Sari Dienes, The Drawing Center, New York, NY

2013 Invocation, Pomona Cultural Center, NY

2011 Sari Dienes Retrospective Exhibition, Garner Arts Center, Garnerville, NY

1995 Sari Dienes – Ölbilder, Zeichnungen und Objekte, Galerie Etage, Münster, Germany

1992 Sari Dienes 1898–1992 – Rubbings, Emily Harvey Gallery, New York, NY

1992 Sari Dienes – Selected Works 1930–1992, A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY

1991 Sari Dienes – Retrospettiva 1950–1970, La Giarina, Verona, Italy

1990 Sari Dienes – Recent Works, A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY

Sari Dienes – Retrospective 1950–1970, Galerie J & J Donguy, Paris, France

1989 New Works by Sari Dienes, New City Library, New York, NY

1988 Sari Dienes – New Work, Multi Media, A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY

Sari Dienes, Tomkins Cove Public Library, Stony Point, NY

1987 Sari Dienes, Morin-Miller Galleries, New York, NY

1986 Sari Dienes – New Work, A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY

Retrospective, Thorpe Intermedia Gallery, Sparkill, New York, NY

1983 Sari Dienes – Past and Present – Creative Works, Hopper House Gallery, Nyack, NY

Sari Dienes – No Squares, A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY

1982 Sari Dienes, Creative Re-Use, A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY

1981 Sari Dienes, Altos de Chavon, La Romana, Dominican Republic

Sari Dienes, Modern Art Gallery, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Sari Dienes, Maurice M. Pine Free Public Library, Fair Lawn, NJ

1980 Sari Dienes – New Works, A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY

Sari Dienes – Sidewalk Rubbings, Donnell Library Center, New York, NY

1977 Sari Dienes – Portraits, A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY

Sari Dienes – Ceramics, Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York, NY

1975 Sari Dienes – Sound Sculptures – Glass, Wood, Metal, A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY

New School for Social Research, New York, NY

1974 Sari Dienes, Andre Zarre Gallery, New York, NY

Sari Dienes – Petroglyph Rubbings, Byrd Hoffman Foundation, New York, NY

Sari Dienes in her retrospective at Thorpe Intermedia Gallery, Sparkill, NY, 1986.

1973 Sari Dienes – Recent Work, A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY

1972 Sari Dienes – Works 1930–1972, The Rockland Foundation, West Nyack, NY

Sari Dienes – American Indian Petroglyph Rubbings, New York Public Library, Hudson Park branch, New York, NY

1971 Sari Dienes – Prints and Projections, Rockland Community College, Suffern, NY

1968 Sari Dienes – Petroglyph Rubbings, Davidson Art Center, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT

1965 Sari Dienes, Nobles County Art Center, Worthington, MN

1964 Sari Dienes – A Surrounding, Smolin Gallery, New York, NY

1959 Sidewalk Rubbings, The Contemporaries Gallery, New York, NY

Sari Dienes – New Paintings and Ceramics, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY

1958 Sari Dienes, Yamada Art Gallery, Kyoto, Japan

Dienes, Toyoko Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

1957 Sari Dienes, Stephens College, Columbia, MO

Sari Dienes, Gump’s Gallery, San Francisco, CA

Sari Dienes – Petroglyph Rubbings, Mills College of Education Gallery, New York, NY

1956 Sari Dienes – Objects Trouve (Objects Found), Mills College of Education Gallery, New York, NY

Bonwit Teller Windows, New York, NY

1955 Bonwit Teller Windows, New York, NY

Sari Dienes, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY

Mills College of Education Gallery, New York, NY

1954 Sari Dienes, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY

1952 Sari Dienes, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT

1950 Sari Dienes, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY

1949 Sari Dienes – Etchings and Engravings, Wittenborn & Schultz Bookshop, New York, NY

1948 Sari Dienes – Paintings Drawings, Carlebach Gallery, New York, NY

1944 Sari Dienes, Parsons School of Design, New York, NY

1942 Sari Dienes – Twenty Drawings, New School for Social Research, New York, NY

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2025 On the Street, Kunstmuseum, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

2024 Fresh Window: Art of Display and Display of Art, Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland

Exhibition announcement for Sari Dienes’s solo exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY, 1955.

Fragments of Memory, Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, TX

2023 Womens Work, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

2022 Fluxus Sex Ties / Hier spielt die Musik!, Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, Germany

Proto-Feminism in the Print Studio, Arcadia University, Glenside, PA

The House of Dust: Women’s Work 1960–2020, Musee d’Art Moderne et Contemporain Saint-Etienne Metropole, Saint-Priest-en-Jarez, France

Past | Present: Expanding the Stories of Glass, Corning Museum of Glass, NY

2021 71/21 Women In the Arts 50th Anniversary Exhibition, Ceres Gallery, New York, NY

Up To and Including Her Limits, Halsey & McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY

Ray Johnson: What a Dump, David Zwirner Gallery, New York, NY

2020 Four Years: Gifts and Acquisitions, Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland

Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Nothing Is So Humble: Prints from Everyday Objects, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

American Modernism: 20th Century Influencers in Rockland County, Rockland Center for the Arts, West Nyack, NY

2019 Collection 1940s–1970s: Stamp, Scavenge, Crush, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

2017 Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Masterclass: A Survey of Work from the 20th Century, Pavel Zoubok Fine Art at Jill Newhouse Gallery, New York, NY

Fokus: Papier, Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland

Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965, Grey Art Gallery, New York, NY

2015 The Precarious, The Menil Collection, Houston, TX

Apparitions: Frottages and Rubbings From 1860 to Now, The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA

2013 L’Objet Trouvé: Readymades, Rectified, and Reassembled, Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York, NY

2008 A.I.R. Gallery: The History Show, work by A.I.R. artists from 1972 to the present, Tracy/Barry Gallery, Bobst Library, New York, NY

1996 Colony Printmakers – MacDowell Colony Printmakers 1925–1995, Sharon Arts Center, Peterborough, NH

1989 American Women Artists – The 20th Century, Knoxville Museum of Art, TN

1984 The Sound/Art Show, The Sculpture Center; BACA Downtown Cultural Center, New York, NY

1981 A.I.R. Gallery New York, Lunds Konsthall, Sweden

A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY

1979 As We See Ourselves: Artists’ Self Portraits, Heckscher Museum, Huntington, NY

Expressions of Self: Women and Autobiography, Douglass Residential College, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

Holiday A.I.R., A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY

1978 An Exhibition in Two Parts by the A.I.R. Gallery, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Queens, NY

1977 Sculpture/Rockland, Rockland Center for the Arts, West Nyack, NY

1976 40 Years of American Collage, St. Peter’s College Art Gallery, Jersey City, NJ

A.I.R. Print Portfolio: Women Making History, A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY

Women in the Arts/ Artists’ Choice, Chatham College, Pittsburgh, PA

1975 The Year of the Woman, Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY

Nine Artists at Work, Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY

Works on Paper – Women Artists, Brooklyn Museum, NY

1973 A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY

1972 Sari Dienes, Lily Ente and Louise Nevelson, Buecker & Harpsichords, New York, NY

1966 Recent Still Life, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI

for the

1964 Moods of Light, American Federation of Arts, New York, NY

1962 Prints of Atelier 17, Associated American Artists, New York, NY

Continuity and Change: 45 American Painters and Sculptures, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT

1961 The Art of Assemblage, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Dallas Museum of Contemporary Art, TX; San Francisco Museum of Art, CA

1960 New Media/New Forms, Version II, Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, NY

New Media/New Forms, Version I, Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, NY

1959 Art and the Found Object, American Federation of Arts, New York, NY

1957 American Exhibition 62nd Annual, Paintings and Sculpture, Art Institute of Chicago, IL

1956 Design by the Yard – Textile Printing from 800 to 1956, Cooper Union, New York, NY

1953 Seventh National Print Annual Traveling Exhibition, Brooklyn Museum, NY

1952 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, Watercolors and Drawings, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

Atelier 17, Milwaukee Art Museum, WI

1950 Tenth Annual Jury Exhibition, The Watercolor Society of Alabama, Birmingham Public Library

Exhibition poster for New Forms – New Media II, Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, NY, 1960. Martha Jackson Gallery Archives, University at Buffalo Anderson Gallery, State University of New York at Buffalo.

1949 Third National Print Annual Exhibition, Brooklyn Museum, NY

1948 Second National Print Annual Exhibition, Brooklyn Museum, NY

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Art Institute of Chicago, IL

Brooklyn Museum, NY

Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY

Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris, France

Corning Museum of Glass, NY

Fleming Museum, Burlington, VT

Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA

Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland

Maitland Art Center, Orlando, FL

The Menil Collection, Houston, TX

Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC

Stephens College, Columbia, MO

Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside University of Buffalo, NY (Martha Jackson Collection)

University of Iowa, Iowa City (Lil Picard Collection)

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

COMMISSION

1956 Native American Petroglyphs, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

AWARDS

1981 National Women’s Caucus for Art, Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts

1980 Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts

Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant

1976 International Women’s Art Festival, Award for Outstanding Cultural Contributions

1965 Ford Foundation Grant for a residency and exhibition at Nobles County Art Center, Worthington, MN

RESIDENCIES

1981 Altos de Chavon, La Romana, Dominican Republic

1965 Nobles County Art Center, Worthington, MN

1955 Huntingdon Hartford Foundation, Pacific Palisades, CA

1954 Maitland Art Center, Maitland, FL

Cummington School of the Arts, MA

Sari Dienes at Nobles County Art Center, Worthington, MN, October 9, 1965.

1953 MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH

Yaddo Artists Retreat, Saratoga Springs, NY

1951 MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH

TEACHING

1946 Brooklyn Museum Art School, NY

1941 Parsons School of Design, New York, NY

1936 Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts, London, United Kingdom, Assistant Director

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Sari Dienes with June Blum, Alice Neel, Isabel Bishop, Lil Picard, Lilly Brody, Lois Mailou Jones, and others for “Women Artists – Seventy Plus” panel at the Brooklyn Museum, November 2, 1975. Photograph by Maurice C. Blum.

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Duane Mason, “Indian Figures Lifted From Rocks,” Dalles Chronicle. November 10, 1956.

John Wilcock, “Boulevard Beachcomber,” The Village Voice February 15, 1956.

Sari Dienes and M.C. Richard, “Sari Dienes: Unconventional Use of Print Techniques,” Craft Horizons. March–April 1956.

“16 Ready-made Screens to Use as Accents,” House and Garden. September–October 1956.

Parker Tyler, “Sari Dienes,” ARTnews. December 1955.

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Muriel Herzberg, “‘Fire’ Doesn’t Reach Potential,” Illinois Alumni News. March 1952.

“The Work Before the Revels,” The Daily Compass. April 25, 1951.

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“A Group and Singly,” New York Times. April 18, 1948.

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“Review: Twenty Drawings,” New York Herald Tribune. December 20, 1942.

Howard Devree, “A Reviewer’s Notebook: Brief Comment on Some Recently Opened Group and One-Man Exhibitions,” New York Times. December 20, 1942.

Sari Dienes dressed for the Easter Parade, New York, NY, c. 1976.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the Sari Dienes Foundation for their partnership on this exhibition and catalogue. We are especially grateful to Barbara Pollitt and Rip Hayman for their generosity and passion in stewarding Dienes’s legacy as well as sharing their expertise, memories of Sari, and archival materials with us. Thank you to Michelle Donnelly for her insightful and illuminating essay for this publication, and for her steadfast commitment to furthering scholarship on this important artist. We are grateful that Michelle moderated a discussion during our exhibition between two artists who are working in Dienes’s tradition. Thank you to Judith K Brodsky and Alix Vernet for their discussion demonstrating how they are furthering Dienes’s legacy within their own work. Alix’s exhibition, Everything She Touches, showcased the continued relevance of Dienes’s work for a new generation of artists and we are grateful for her dialogue with Dienes in this beautiful show. For their assistance with image productions, we thank David Zwirner, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Menil Collection, Northwestern University, Sotheby’s and the UB Anderson Gallery Archives. Thank you to the whole team at Eric Firestone Gallery for making all of this possible!

Lastly, we are grateful to Sari Dienes for her reminder that beauty can so often be found under our feet.

— Eric Firestone

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

Sari Dienes: Night Eyes

February 4–March 21, 2026 on view at Eric Firestone Gallery 40 Great Jones Street, New York, NY

ISBN: 979-8-9931807-3-1

LCCN: 2026905787

Cover: detail of Kyoto No. 3, see pl. 3

Endpapers: details of The Nest, see pl. 4

Frontispiece: Sari Dienes in Stony Point, NY, c. 1990. Photograph by Warren Inglese.

p.2: Sari Dienes creating Spring outside Cedar Tavern, June 23, 1970. Photograph by Peter Moore © Northwestern University. Peter Moore Photography Archive, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries.

p.16: Sari Dienes at Nobles County Art Center, Worthington, MN, 1965.

Editor: Maddy Henkin

Editorial Assistant: Alabel Chapin

Exhibition photography © 2026 Sam Glass

Publication copyright © 2026 Eric Firestone Press

All artwork © 2026 Sari Dienes Foundation/ Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

All historic images, unless otherwise noted, are courtesy of the Sari Dienes Foundation, Pomona, NY.

Reproduction of contents prohibited

All rights reserved

Published by Eric Firestone Press 4 Newtown Lane East Hampton, NY 11937

Principal: Eric Firestone

Managing Partner: Kara Winters

Senior Director: Jennifer Samet

Associate Director: Maddy Henkin

Research Assistant: Alabel Chapin

Photography: Sam Glass

Design: Isabelle Smeall

Printing: GHP

Eric Firestone Gallery

40 Great Jones Street New York, NY 10012

646-998-3727

4 Newtown Lane East Hampton, NY 11937

631-604-2386

Ericfirestonegallery.com