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“All the arts lose virtue against the essential reality of creatures going about their business among the equally earnest elements of nature.”
- Robinson Jeffers

Sarah Wieben

About A Destiny of Our Own Making...

In giving my current body of work the title “A Destiny of Our Own Making,” I am both quoting a great modern orator (President Obama heralding the passage of his Stimulus Package) and also making reference to Manifest Destiny, along with its visual component, The American Sublime. Which is not to say all American Sublime painters supported the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, because they did not, but they did very much address and respond to it, which is the potent point I’m getting at.

By today’s standards, the views of the American Sublime painters would strike one as benignly sentimental on one hand, to uncomfortably politically incorrect on the other, less benign hand. Their views belong to their time. What I admire about them, and what I am inspired by, is their level of involvement in the discourse of the day – that being, the formation of an American national identity. For the Sublime painters, who were very much influenced by and in communication with the writers, poets and philosophers of the day (Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau) the question of national identity was as new as the nation was young.

Today our nation has aged enough to be at a crossroads in our country’s history, and for us the question of our national identity is a renewed question. Who are we? Who are we not?

Having been born in the 1960s, I am a child of the Postmodern era. But as such, I have always felt estranged from Postmodernism, with its disillusionment and cynicism and its persistent dismantling of values – values that I happen to believe in. This used to worry me. What did it say about me as an artist to admit that I felt detached from the prevailing art movement of my time?

The victory of Barack Obama in November 2008 signaled to me that I had not been alone in my estrangement. Others too had languished and yearned as I did for political and cultural renewal. His victory was a harbinger that the country was in the process of a major paradigm shift. How else could one interpret the victory of a political candidate who built his campaign on the foundation of that most anti-Postmodern notion – Hope?

It has been said that a people cannot survive and prosper without a unified national mythology. I agree with this position with the added assertion that if a mythology exists by consensus, it ceases to be myth and becomes instead a reality.

If I am reading the signs correctly, and it is indeed time to reconsider the question of our national identity, then I feel compelled as an artist, and as a citizen, to participate in that discourse. The work on view for this show is the visual manifestation of how I see my fellow Americans – it is the beginning rather than the summation of my vision of who we are.

- Sarah Wieben, August 2009

Sarah Wieben paints in oils on canvas or board.  Her landscapes capture the particular look and feel of Midwestern farm country.  To those of us who grew up here, we look at them and say, “That just feels like home.”

“It sometimes happens in life that events compel us to face the fact that we, none of us, have much control over our own lives as we like to think we do.  I see this too in the landscape when I paint it.  We have our hands on the land.  We attempt to harness its power, to use it, to change the face of it.  Forgetting all the while that it is our host, and we may someday wear out our welcome.  My current work reflects man’s constant, often futile struggle to control our lives and the natural world.”

Sarah’s original course of study was at the University of Minnesota in Soviet Studies.  She lived in Moscow in the late 1980’s and early 90s, working at the U.S. Embassy and teaching school.  It was in Moscow that she discovered art.  She returned to the U.S. determined to study art, and recently received her Bachelor of Fine Art degree from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Sarah’s work has rapidly developed a following among collectors in the Twin Cities area, and we are confident that she will quickly garner national attention.