Sarah Cooper is a curator, writer, and art historian based in Los Angeles.
She is the Public Programs Specialist for performance at the J. Paul Getty Museum, where she directs the experimental performance series Ever Present, among other programs.
She has organized programs featuring artists and musicians including Kim Gordon, Simone Forti, Brendan Fernandes, Patti Smith, Lonnie Holley, Martin Creed, Midori Takada, Helado Negro, Moor Mother, David Wojnarowicz, Derek Jarman, and Solange Knowles.
In addition, Sarah has held positions at The Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Royal Academy in London, and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
She holds a Master's Degree in Art History from Hunter College, New York. Her thesis, Expanding Experimentalism: Popular Music and Art at the Kitchen in New York City, 1971-1985, explores the creative output of artists' bands and the relationship between popular music and avant-garde performance practices.
sarahannecooper [at] gmail.com
She is the Public Programs Specialist for performance at the J. Paul Getty Museum, where she directs the experimental performance series Ever Present, among other programs.
She has organized programs featuring artists and musicians including Kim Gordon, Simone Forti, Brendan Fernandes, Patti Smith, Lonnie Holley, Martin Creed, Midori Takada, Helado Negro, Moor Mother, David Wojnarowicz, Derek Jarman, and Solange Knowles.
In addition, Sarah has held positions at The Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Royal Academy in London, and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
She holds a Master's Degree in Art History from Hunter College, New York. Her thesis, Expanding Experimentalism: Popular Music and Art at the Kitchen in New York City, 1971-1985, explores the creative output of artists' bands and the relationship between popular music and avant-garde performance practices.
sarahannecooper [at] gmail.com
Contemporary Dance Film Commissions
J. Paul Getty Museum, Special Exhibitions Pavillion
February 15–May 8, 2022
Photo by Ciarra K. Walters
In conjunction with the exhibition Poussin and the Dance, on view February 15–May 8, 2022, Getty commissioned Los Angeles-based dance companies to create works in dialogue with the French artist’s paintings. Poussin’s scenes feature intricate compositions of bodies in motion, at times in celebration or despair. Each commissioned work responds to elements of Poussin’s powerful depictions.
hbny (pronounced eh-boh-nee) by Chris Emile
Photo by Ciarra K. Walters
hbny (pronounced eh-boh-nee) is a dance film by Chris Emile. Here a new narrative is imagined for the mythic tribe of the Sabines, of whom little is known outside of their victimization by Roman conquerors, famously depicted in Poussin’s masterwork The Abduction of the Sabine Women. Filmed in the urban wasteland of L.A.’s Devil’s Gate, Emile’s Sabines inhabit a landscape that appears ancient and contemporary at once, in which they interact with fierceness, tenderness, shared sorrow, and unbridled joy, exuding a sense of freedom and agency over their own bodies and minds.
Run time: 17:29
Credits: Directed, Produced, Choreographed, Written, and Edited by Chris Emile
chrisemile.com
PORTRAIT by Micaela Taylor
PORTRAIT is a dance film by Micaela Taylor, founding artistic director of The TL Collective, commissioned by the Getty Museum. Emphasizing her signature glitch-like movements and extreme facial expressions, Taylor deconstructs Poussin’s elaborate scenes to isolate and investigate the internal struggle depicted on individual faces. Staged within the mathematical grids and textured stones of the Getty Center’s architecture, the dancers blur lines and forms taken from classical dance into their otherwise freeform movements and unsettling smiles appear on their faces aimed right at the camera. This slipstream between the classical and the unconventional, the joyful and the disturbing, echo the disarming way Poussin creates ravishing beauty out of moments of chaos and violence.
Run time: 15:08
Credits: Choreographed and Edited by Micaela Taylor. Directed by Silvia Grav.
thetlcollective.com
CAÑA by Ana María Alvarez
Photo by Fara Sosa
CAÑA is a dance film by Ana María Alvarez, founding artistic director of CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater. In Poussin, Alvarez saw an investigation of movement within a natural landscape, of rich textures and textiles in motion, and of the mystery of ritual. Included in the exhibition is Poussin’s epic painting Dance in Honor of Priapus, which provides a window into a private ritual being performed by a group of women dancing in a ring. Alvarez’s film also draws us into a private world of a group of women, dancing together unselfconsciously among natural landscapes and dressed in lusciously colored textiles. Throughout the film, sugar cane is ripped, bitten, and swung about as a meditation on this indulgent substance—echoing themes of vice and virtue, and the pitfalls of bacchanalia that were investigated by Poussin.
Run time: 13:37
Credits: Direction and Choreographic Vision: Ana María Alvarez
contra-tiempo.org
LINKS
Poussin and the Dance video exhibition website
Getty Art + Ideas Podcast, “Poussin and the Dance Shines New Light on French Painter,” hosted by James Cuno, with curators Emily Beeny and Sarah Cooper.
Virtual Exhibition Tour with curators Emily Beeny and Sarah Cooper