Sarah Bork | Girls Gotta Eat
Pop-up Exhibition
Thu Mar 17, 2022 - Thu Mar 31, 2022
In Girls Gotta Eat, the grocery store becomes a kaleidoscopic backdrop for cinematic portraits of drag performers grocery shopping. Sarah Bork’s colorful photographs, paired with handwritten grocery lists and in-depth interviews, explore a spectrum of identities and experiences beyond the traditional gender binary. Inspired by a desire to mend division and reestablish connection, Bork highlights a community of creatives weaving gender exploration, joy and hope into the daily business of self care. With each vivid image, Bork invites us to be more inclusive by seeing the shared humanity of her subject’s gestures and actions. The exhibition will culminate in a drag performance and reception celebrating inclusivity and connection.
Groceries are groceries.
Other Is Us.
About the Artist
Sarah Bork is an Austin-based mixed media artist. She is known for her extraordinarily fun photo booth sessions as well as photographing local families in every stage of life, from birth to death, over the last 20 years. Her work is based on the idea that reframing things makes them more joyful- ordinary objects can both benefit from a new perspective.
Sarah was raised in Frederick, MD by a licensed clinical social worker and a family business consultant. She learned to be interested in people and their stories early. Dinner table discussions often touched on the inner workings of families in business and of children living in residential treatment centers. The study of character came naturally and Sarah acted in plays and musicals in high school and then majored in theater in college. Shortly after graduating she was hired on a crew at Sundance Film Lab which began a 13 year period of working in the film industry in a variety of roles, both in front of and behind the camera in New York and Los Angeles. After moving to Austin in 1996, Sarah took a photography class and immediately recognized that this would be her life-long method of creative expression.
Girls Gotta Eat is a book project that was originally inspired by the anguish she felt starting in 2016 over the perfect storm of political division in her family, her eldest child moving out of the house and the #metoo movement. To date Sarah has photographed 25 drag artists in grocery stores, interviewing 30 more for a total of 55 in-depth interviews. The next iteration of the project will be a coffee table book. Images from this series have been selected for The Femme Abstract curated by Moya McIntyre, The People’s Gallery at City Hall, ATX and for a billboard for the Come To Your Census Campaign by Art + Action in San Francisco.
