The Bass Museum of Art | Sarah Crowner in Dialogue with Etel Adnan

FAIRE FOYER: SARAH CROWNER IN DIALOGUE WITH ETEL ADNAN

AUG 20, 2025–JUL 26, 2026

Faire Foyer: Sarah Crowner in Dialogue with Etel Adnan on view August 20, 2025, through July 26, 2026. The exhibition brings together new work by the artist Sarah Crowner and a monumental ceramic mural by Etel Adnan, the only example of its kind by Adnan in the United States.

Crowner, whose practice engages geometric abstraction across painting, sculpture, and design, creates a semicircular carpeted alcove—or in French faire foyer, a welcoming transitional space connecting the exterior to a home’s interior—that frames Adnan’s mural. Within this setting, Crowner highly reflective bronze sculptures cast from enlarged beach stones, arranged in relation to the mural, are presented alongside photographs of the California coastline taken by Adnan in the 1960s. The installation invites viewers into a tactile, spatial encounter with materiality, movement, and the traditions of abstraction explored by both artists.

Sarah Crowner (b. 1974) is an American artist whose work with geometric abstraction blurs the boundaries between painting, sculpture, set design, and ceramics. Exploring the formal language of abstraction with simplicity and intuition, her ongoing experiments in site-responsive installations revisit and reimagine the legacies of modernist art and architecture. Recalling the work of artists like Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) and Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889–1943) and even architects such as Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992), Crowner intertwines the expansive language of abstraction with craft, design, and the built environment.

Though hefty in weight, Crowner’s highly reflective bronzes—her “stones” cast from enlarged versions of found beach pebbles—have a sense of lightness and rhythm while asserting a definitive, dazzling presence. Their reflective but imperfect surfaces distort the surroundings, including the hues of Adnan’s mural. The sculptures are placed on pedestals like precious stones, and arranged in relation to the exhibition’s other works, which include rarely exhibited photographs of the rocky California coastline taken by Adnan in the 1960s. Reflecting viewers’ movements and physical proximity to the forms, Crowner’s bronzes and installation design weave together varying surfaces—glaze, metal, fiber, carpet and color. The interplay of materials furthers the artist’s pursuit of visual harmony between abstraction and the spaces where art and viewers intersect.

Etel Adnan (1925–2021) was a Lebanese-American painter and poet who created radiant landscape paintings and abstract drawings with rich, geometric fields of color. She is among the artists who have similarly expanded abstraction beyond the confines of the canvas. Adnan’s work has occasionally been translated into large-scale tapestries and murals, like the monumental ceramic mural in The Bass’s collection—the only such example by Adnan in the United States. For the exhibition Faire Foyer: Sarah Crowner in Dialogue with Etel Adnan, Crowner creates a setting for a formal exchange between her work and Adnan’s with a semicircular carpeted alcove—what she describes as faire foyer—bringing viewers into an embodied experience with Adnan’s art and Crowner’s own sculptures.

Faire Foyer: Sarah Crowner in Dialogue with Etel Adnan is organized by James Voorhies, The Bass Curator at Large.