Working across a range of media including video, sound, performance, sculpture, collage, and installation, New York–based artist Sara Magenheimer (b. 1981, Philadelphia, PA) disrupts, manipulates, and defamiliarizes language with bold combinations of image and text. Her videos incorporate traditional filmic editing techniques alongside those inspired by music and collage. In syncopated progressions of pictures and words, Magenheimer pushes against the bounds of narrative, charting circuitous storylines through vernacular associations that invite individual interpretations. Through surprising juxtapositions of language, graphic compositions, and idiosyncratic imagery, she reveals how visual and verbal signs mutate and guide manifold pathways to understanding.

In 2018, Magenheimer presented “NOON,” a new video installation in the window of the New Museum’s 231 Bowery building. This project was the second in a series of window installations, which relaunched the program the New Museum originally mounted in the 1980s. In conjunction with her window installation, a selection of Magenheimer’s films was also on view as part of the Museum’s ongoing Screen Series. This project is curated by Margot Norton, Curator.

On the occasion of her project, Magenheimer also completed “Notes on Art and Resistance A–Z,” a downloadable PDF. Written by the artist over the course of the preceding year, following the 2016 US presidential election, the text comprises a sequence of personal meditations on making art in a time of profound political and social change.