Draft:SARA Joyce

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Sara Joyce (nee Joyce Marjory Allen and later stylized as SARA)
SARA holding a child.
Born	(1923-07-26)July 26, 1923
Died	January 8, 2011(2011-01-08) (aged 87)
Occupations	Multidisciplinary Contemporary Artist Painter Sculpture Textile Artist
Website	https://sarajoyceart.com/

Sara Joyce (nee Joyce Marjory Allen and later stylized as SARA; July 26, 1923 – January 8, 2011) was a predominantly self-taught contemporary artist in Idaho. Her extensive multi-disciplinary body of work includes ceramics, oil and acrylic paintings, drawings, and textiles, the latter evident in her handmade wardrobe and her cloth sculptures, where she developed a technique she called ‘eglomerate’. While Joyce remained relatively unknown during her lifetime, her work has gained notoriety in recent years, leading to more than a dozen gallery and museum exhibitions, permanent collection acquisitions, and a Daytime Emmy®-winning Idaho Public Television documentary titled SARA: A Life in Dreams and Symbols.

Biography

SARA was born Joyce Marjory Allen on July 26,1923 in Chino, California. In the Great Depression, the family accompanied her father, a leather smith, throughout the American Southwest seeking work. With her mother often ill, Joyce helped with everything from cooking, sewing, and mending to providing care for her younger siblings. At the same time, she absorbed the desert landscape and creatures, which would become major themes in her artwork.

Shortly before turning nine, Joyce assisted her father with the delivery of her premature twin sisters, one of whom was stillborn. They wrapped baby Sara Josephine in tissue paper and buried her in a shoebox. Joyce later took her sister’s name in the belief that souls of people who die at birth live on in someone else. From her journal: “The key - the baby dead - Sarah Josephine - lying in the shoebox, her face covered with tissue paper. I pick her up “again” and carry her with me…”

At 14, Joyce became a live-in mother’s helper in Pima, Arizona, moving with her employers to Los Angeles and later San Diego, where she met her future husband, Navy Lieutenant Italo ‘Babe’ Caccia.

Joyce joined Italo in Pocatello, Idaho where he became Athletic Director at Idaho State University. They married in 1947 and had three children: Heidi, John, and Bill. Her Depression-era upbringing and future artistic output were evident in the family’s handmade clothes, furniture slipcovers, and curtains. With access to college classes, she studied art, history, anthropology, mythology, and psychology, leading to ‘a great intellectual awakening.’

Joyce and Italo divorced in 1972. In honor of her late sister, Joyce changed her name to Sara Josephine Joyce and by the ‘80s, she signed her work and was widely known simply as SARA.

Art Career in Idaho

Warrior, SARA, 16 x 6 x 3

SARA’s first explicit foray into art came in the form of clayworks in the 1960s. She dug clay from the banks of the Snake River, firing her early vessels and altars in pits fueled by cow dung and juniper wood, creating a uniquely rough texture to the finished works. She experimented with various types of clay and firing methods, eventually creating her own studio with a kiln, wheel, and slab table.

Giant’s Jawbone, SARA,19x5x2

After her divorce in 1972, SARA supported herself through real estate with special interest in commercial buildings and Victorian homes. She purchased a storefront in Genesee, Idaho and converted it into multipurpose art studios and apartments.

In 1993, SARA moved back to Pocatello, where a friend and fellow artist curated a small gallery showing of SARA’s work at the Vesuvius Gallery. Despite demand, she remained disinterested in the display or sale of her artwork. She would occasionally barter her art, but she turned down offers from galleries and museums.

SARA destroyed many of her early clay pieces – burying the accompanying paintings and sketches as well — most still bearing her married initials ‘JAC’. Surviving ceramics were treasured pieces and prominently displayed in her various homes and studios.

Dress, Inside Outward, Textile by SARA

A propensity for fabric was born out of necessity and repetition for SARA, and she viewed garments as art, remarking ‘The body gives form to a piece of cloth.’ She incorporated an Eastern sensibility into the European-style construction of her clothing. Her daily wardrobe tended to the comfortable and functional, belying the artistry of which she was capable, as seen in her Kimono Dress in the permanent collection at the Pacific Northwest Quilt and Fiber Arts Museum.

Rwanda, SARA, Textile Sculpture demonstrating 'eglomerate' technique

SARA developed a technique she called ‘eglomerate’ to create form out of fabric. Her human forms are deceptively simple but required skill to make. Created by tightly wrapping fabric into a ball for the head, then a cylinder for the body, then finished by stitching the parts together. The bodies are often decorated with bits of found fabric and buttons to create evocative busts and dolls. Some are abstract, though far from featureless, while others have distinct facial features. One half-body, Lothar, sat on her bedside table and served as her protector.

Bird of Wisdom, SARA, Acrylic on paper, 18 x 20.75

While SARA’s ceramics and, to a certain extent, textiles were more of a public practice, painting was a private endeavor. She covered her work when receiving visitors and remained hesitant to display her paintings for nearly her entire life. Painting was deeply personal, the process meditative, and the results often reflected her dreamlife –noting ‘a wealth of knowledge and potential exists in our dream state.’ Not all her inspiration lay in the dreamworld, however. She often painted friends and acquaintances, using art to acknowledge what happened in her daily life.

SARA layered colors, sometimes for days or even weeks before a form began to emerge, which she described as ‘sudden, exciting, and unpredictable.’ She used professional supplies in a childlike manner, often featuring bold bands of color. She described black as the most important color of the 20th Century and used her own recipe for mixing the black pigment that appears in both her portraiture and abstract works.

Archetypal Images, Journals, and Other Influences

SARA credited Dr. Sven Liljebald, Professor of Anthropology at ISU, for sparking her intellectual pursuits. His work on Great Basin Linguistics and Native Traditions motivated SARA to study etymology and world cultures, which would become lifelong passions and sources of inspiration. World religions, the image of the Buddha, ancient healers, shamans and medicine men, mythic creatures, Gila monsters, and worms, termites, and all ‘those who dwell beneath the earth’ would become common motifs.

Speak No Evil, SARA, Oil on canvas board, 18 x 24

At the same time, SARA became interested in Carl Jung’s work describing archetypal symbols and imagery that manifest in a person’s spiritual journey. Though inspired by academia, SARA quickly eschewed formal schooling in favor of engaging with these topics on her own terms. She developed personal archetypal symbols and used symbolism in her art - the snake shedding its skin, the ladder or staircase (moving forward and upward), houses and furniture, ‘the straight and curve from which all art stems’ and the feminine form in abstract.

SARA Journal Excerpt, 1994-95

The foundation of SARA’s artistic expression is evident in her journals and dream notebooks, which she always kept next to her bed. Initially SARA simply wrote about her dreams upon awakening, however those were burned by her son at her behest. She shifted to a largely visual and highly symbolic style of dream journaling, often featuring a sketch of her reclining in bed, a thought bubble above her head, while physical actions occur around her. Nearly all her artistic output can be traced back to journal entries, where we see different iterations of her archetypal symbols, images, and iconography.

The 30 remaining journals consist of over 3,000 pages and are a collection of visual journals, art books, old ledgers, envelopes, and loose papers. The journals contain 170 signed works, hundreds of unsigned drawings, sketches, and dream stories rendered in crayon, pencil, marker, pen, and watercolor. Alongside the artwork are her own insights and quotes on art, as well as from other noted artists, designers, thinkers, poets, and friends.

SARA Journal Excerpt, 1994

SARA’s journals show an extensive understanding of other artists and their approach to similar imagery. She cites names like Agnes Martin, Chagall, Picasso, and Klee directly, and she would create works of her own rendered in differing artistic styles. At first glance, it is tempting to categorize her artwork as ‘Naive’, ‘Outsider’, or ‘Primitive’ based on her relative isolation from contemporaries, lack of formal schooling, bold use of color, and other factors. Her journals bely such categorizations and reveal a profound understanding of other artists, and meticulous, studied, and intentional compositions.

Death and legacy

In 2009 at the age of 86, Sara moved to Moscow, Idaho to be near her daughter Heidi. Her children discovered a stunning amount of original artwork, including over 130 never-seen acrylic paintings.

Shortly before her passing, the final showing of her work during her life was exhibited at the Center for Arts and History in Lewiston, Idaho. She was ‘moved beyond words’ seeing her life’s work on display, from some of her earliest ceramics to her oil and acrylic paintings to a selection of her remarkable textile sculptures.

Following SARA’s death on January 8th, 2011, her children undertook an extensive documentation effort to catalogue her work that took more than a decade. Few of her approximately 370 surviving works were named or had any accompanying explanation. Through close examination of more than 3,000 pages of journals and art books – ‘each page a treasure trove of information and creativity’ - the original name and inspiration for nearly all her pieces were uncovered, documented, and published.

Courtney Gilbert, the curator of visual arts at the Sun Valley Museum of Art, included Joyce’s work in the 2019 exhibition Behind the Sagebrush Curtain: Women Modernists in Idaho and Montana. She remarks: “One of the things that’s so amazing to me is that she was working in a style that was so Modernist and so atypical of painting in the American West in that period. Her work was rooted in Idaho, and you see references to the land, but she was wrestling with the ideas of so many cultures.” Sara’s is noted for her desire to marry the landscapes and subject matter of the American West with ideas and techniques associated with international modernism, despite her geographic and social isolation from her contemporaries and influences.