Glen Ellyn, IL
Sabina Ott
hope is the thing with feathers
https://sabinaott.net/home.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabina_Ott
Sabina Ott was born in New York City in 1955 and grew up in Los Angeles. She received her BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Her work, called “social, democratic, and celebratory” by her friend Chris Kraus garnered many prestigious awards including the National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship (1990), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2015), and the 2015 Chicagoan of the Year in Art .
As her studio practice evolved, she became a curator who offered hundreds of artists opportunities at a historic moment in Chicago’s community practice movement.
Ott arrived in Chicago in 2005 to become the Chair of Art and Design at Columbia College Chicago. In 2011, she founded Terrain Exhibitions with her husband, writer and educator John Paulett. Terrain featured installations and interventions in the front yard of their Oak Park home, and later through two city-wide biennials. Terrain combined a home-grown local aesthetic with a serious conversation about art in Chicago. Terrain was the spark that ignited new relationships, new ideas, new artwork, new possibilities.
After a long struggle with cancer, she died in the early hours of June 26, 2018. In her Zava’ah, an Ethical Will in the Jewish custom, she wrote, “Live to give. The only reason we are here is to give.” Ott believed art is a gift to the world.
— Mel Potter
Cleve Carney Art Gallery, 425 Fawell Blvd, Glen Ellyn, Illinois, 60137