Sabrina Gschwandtner

Gschwandtner ‘s work has been exhibited worldwide at institutions, such as the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington D.C.), the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the RISD Museum, and the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation.

Gschwandtner uses film, video, photography, and textiles as her mediums. She sews together filmstrips to create a quilt-like textile. She then installs them with led lights behind them so the viewer can see through the filmstrips when looking up close. She began sewing filmstrips together in 2009 when a friend of hers gave her 16 mm films from Anthology Film Archives that were no longer of use to the Fashion Institute of Technology. Gschwandtner uses documentaries about “art, craft, fashion, decoration, vocation, military camouflage, feminist expression, and scientific metaphor” in her artworks, mostly from the 1950s-80s. Many of the short documentary films recognized and admired women’s role in craft making, such as knitting, crocheting, and fabric dyeing. After she watches the films, she cuts and sews them together in patterns that resemble popular American quilt motifs. She has made several works in a "crazy quilt" pattern. Leah Ollman of the LA Times wrote in a 2017 review: "Gschwandtner unites the strips in traditional quilt patterns — interlocking triangles and diamonds set within squares, energetic designs that play surface against depth, control against abandon. She makes astute use of color, mixing vivid stretches of jade, yellow and cerulean with the faded hues of old footage, all accented with black countdown leader and lengths of toned emptiness." Gschwandtner uses quilts because they symbolize and celebrate "the undervalued work of female laborers and artisans, largely overlooked." . Film Archivist Andrew Lampert says that her work is able to "greatly expand our notion of film editing, narrative and the moving image."

Other works include films and installations for specific sites. For example, Gschwandtner created “Crochet Film” (2004) specifically for a show "Group Loop," put together by Christoph Cox about repetition and cycles. Her piece featured two loops, one, a film of the artist crocheting and the other a crocheted piece representing a film loop. Another series of work on the same theme is "The History of String" which compares the spooling mechanism of a sewing machine to "early film projectors."

Sabrina Gschwandtner (born 1977) is an American artist currently living in Los Angeles, California. She has held numerous showings of her work throughout the country and several pieces have been acquired by museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the RISD Museum.

Sabrina Gschwandtner was born in 1977 in Washington, DC. She studied at the Sommerakademie für Bildende Kunst [de] in Salzburg, Austria under the direction of Valie Export and also with Vlada Petric, founder of the Harvard Film Archive. She earned a Bachelor of Arts with honors in art/semiotics from Brown University in 2000 and in 2008 she received her Master of Fine Arts from Bard College. She is the author of the book Knitknit : Profiles + Projects from Knitting's New Wave.