Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sarah Boyts Yoder. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Sarah, appreciate you joining us today. One of our favorite things to hear about is stories around the nicest thing someone has done for someone else – what’s the nicest thing someone has ever done for you?

The focus of this answer is definitely on teachers. My high school art teacher, to be specific, although at every step of my (art) education there has been A teacher who made a huge impact on my life and trajectory at that particular stage. This teacher nominated me to be a part of a museum program for high school students in our city.

I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, where there are world class art museums. One of them is The Modern and they had a program at the time where local high students were invited (through teacher nominations) into the museum over the course of a couple of months on Saturdays. We got to go behind the scenes, see the artwork up close, have instruction, workshops, classes. It totally changed everything for me. Like most of us, as a kid, I didn’t have any context for real, contemporary art. I didn’t come from a family of artists, we didn’t go to museums or galleries, I didn’t know any working artists, had never been in an artist’s studio. I didn’t have ANY language with contemporary art until that point. But I showed promise and talent in this teachers’ eyes and she gave me this spot in the museum program.

This opportunity offered me the beginnings of that language and it exposed me to experiences with art, paintings in particular, and with creating, that I can still see and FEEL in my minds eye today. I saw and felt connected to a whole world unfurling out before me during those Saturdays, one that I desperately wanted to be a part of. I wasn’t sure how but I can’t overstate how much that experience gave me some kind of a North Star.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a full time painter based in Charlottesville, VA. I grew up in Fort Worth, TX as an artistic kid who luckily had good art teachers in middle and high school and encouraging parents. I received a BFA in painting from Eastern New Mexico University and an MFA in painting from James Madison University in 2006. Since then I’ve participated in almost 50 solo and group exhibitions and my work has been featured in numerous publications and corporate and private collections throughout the United States and abroad, including the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. I have also been the recipient of a professional fellowship in painting from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and have been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, 100W Corsicana in Corsicana, TX, and at Blue Apple in Cartagena, Colombia.

Besides artist residencies and participating in exhibitions, I work full time in my studio and am represented by select galleries in the United States.

ARTISTIC STATEMENT
In a world that all too often insists on inevitability and
separateness, my paintings are playful refusals of these false
assurances and fixedness. Using a visual lexicon of symbols I have
generated over time, each work articulates how space constantly extends
and collapses all around us and how joyfully form can evade our need for
categorization.
What emerges are welcoming and engaging spaces for imaginative play, a
celebratory take on color and material, and an invitation to open up. In this
context, I see the paintings as hopeful, optimistic acts, and the
mode of abstraction as a generous state of being.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I have two children. During the pandemic, schools were closed and my kids didn’t go to school in person for a long time. My studio isn’t in my house and I had to figure out how I was going to keep working with them being at home all the time. Looking back, it was pretty dark and scary because no one knew much about the virus, a lot of people were dying, everything was shutting down and it was all such uncharted territory. But not making work wasn’t an option so I turned to a little shed in our backyard and created a micro studio in there where I could continue to paint every day.

I have a section on my website called ‘Quarantine Studio’ (https://sarahboytsyoder.com/section/490972-QUARANTINE%20STUDIO.html) which has all the work I made during that time. I love all those paintings and besides being a real record of what I was feeling and needing at that specific time, they kept my work moving forward and gave me a lot of hope and purpose.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Being an artist means being in and staying in explore mode. I’m reading all of Octavia Butler’s work this summer. I only recently discovered it even though I always knew she was one of the greats. I’m a huge reader of fiction but never thought science fiction was for me because I’m not into space and tech. But so far I’m finding that her work is not about space and tech and is SO much about human relationships and what it means to be human at all. In Parable of the Sower the main character describes her philosophy and perspective as “discovery rather than invention, exploration rather than creation.”

This is what I mean when I say explore mode. We accept that the things we are searching for already exist, there are truths in the world that are waiting to be discovered, that have always been there. The ACT of exploring and gathering and uncovering is where the beauty lies. My paintings are most successful when there is evidence of this deliberate searching, when they look intentional but also exploratory. I think this constant practice and state of mind also makes for a more open heart and brain moving through the world. Openness to new ideas, people, and experiences. We can change direction quickly, hold multiple truths at once, be comfortable with not knowing, be more ALERT. The Italian writer Lalla Romano states that “In the margins one finds possibilities”. I find this to be true when painting, what I think of as the margin and inconsequential, always becomes the best main thing. But I’ve got to be paying attention, deeply focused but with an openness of mind. I want this for myself as a person in the world and I get to practice being in this mode as an artist and I find proof everyday of it’s benefits in the studio.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.sarahboytsyoder.com
• Instagram: @sarahboytsyoder

Image Credits
Kyle Hobratschk