Sara Schneckloth

Greetings. I'm an artist and university professor with over twenty-five years of experience in drawing practice and research. I exhibit my material-driven, mixed-media drawings worldwide and teach a range of processes to translate a sense of place into drawn image through close observation, connected markmaking, studio experimentation and conceptual play. 

My drawing practice began in the 1990s in San Francisco. Since then, I've shown artwork in over ninety group and solo exhibitions in the US, UK, South Africa, Norway, and France, held numerous residency fellowships, and led drawing workshops at universities and art centers across the US and UK, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY). I publish essays on drawing theory, embodiment and collaborative practice, and foster diverse curatorial projects. 

With degrees from Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin, I'm a full professor at the University of South Carolina, where I head the drawing studio program. My work at USC has been recognized with university-wide teaching awards and the McCausland Faculty Fellowship. In 2014, I came to New Mexico to draw intensively within the landscape; in 2017, I built my drawing studio outside of Regina, NM, and began teaching site-specific drawing workshops throughout the region. For me, drawing here is a way to experience layers of time, material, perception and the senses, all connecting body to place.

Select Publications

• Marking Time, Figuring Space: Gesture and the Embodied Moment
• Mapping the Common Gesture
• Relational Gestures: Three experiments in collaborative drawing

Select Curatorial Projects

• Ecologies of Drawing: In Situ, Drawing Research Network
• Seed Cultures Archive, Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Select Interviews

• In conversation with AM Debrincat, ArtFile Magazine
• Through Flesh and Stone, Jasper Magazine

LINK TO PORTFOLIO AND CV

In 2017, I broke ground for my drawing studio just outside the small town of Regina, New Mexico. I live for nine months out of the year in Columbia, South Carolina; in summer, I am in the Nacimiento Mountains, making mixed media drawings that combine geology and biology, forms that echo both our natural and built environments.  When asked if “artwork comes from the head or the heart,” I firmly believe it is both, the body and mind fully engaged in the act of seeing, feeling, moving, and making. In my practice, drawing is an intimate act of vision and touch combined, leaving a mark that echoes and builds upon a lived experience. 

I believe the discipline of drawing allows for a physical space to nurture ideas as they form and evolve, and is uniquely suited to express our most immediate and ineffable sensations. Through my studio practice, and now these site-specific workshops, I deepen my commitment to translate into drawing the light, texture, and space that are the hallmarks of this place.