Sara Stites works in drawing, painting, photography, and sculpture. Using visual pastiches of different styles (gestural abstraction, cartoonish figuration, surrealism and expressionism), she builds an architecture, a structure of color and figuration.

She says: “The addition of color to my drawing-based work has led to a painterly and intuitive exploration of space, time and light. The architecture of imagined and remembered form is built with scrims of color. These semi-transparent overlays reveal marks that have led to the surface drawing which asserts it’s primacy with concise drawing and clearer color.

Although I sometimes project drawings from notebooks, the final visual impact is far from pre-ordained. In fact, the collage-like process is unpredictable. Clarity and finality come from working the surface of the painting in trial and error that can be wincingly revealing when photos of interim stages are viewed.

Part of my process is photographing the changes made when I step back to ponder the piece. Videos made from these photos are wonderful records of the evolution of a piece. I am working on a way to make them final pieces of work too.

My enchantment with color evolved from observing and, then growing, flowers in Maine. Their form and hue, delicate yet ferocious, engages with my personal iconography to explore issues of vulnerability and the uncanny.

I explore the dichotomy between tradition and anomaly, nature and artifice, male and female, life and death; shown in my work by intertwining organic, natural and fantastical elements that open a window to my world view.”



Sara Stites grew up in an art-filled house, being exposed to Matisse and Picasso prints and her parents’ unique sense of design from birth. She was born in New York City and lived on Long Island until the 5th grade, when she moved, with her family to Puerto Rico. Four years later, she moved back to New York. She says the time in Puerto Rico was definitive in her view of the world. “Aside from a different world view, the tropical light, warmth, and “differentness” made a lasting impression”.

Stites has a BFA from Syracuse University and an MFA from Pratt Institute.
Her work has been seen in solo and group shows in Miami, Hollywood FL, Maine, Buenos Aires, Nice and Paris. Her work is a part of the PAMM, MOAD, Good/Horvitz, and Mosquera Collections in Miami in addition to other private collections.

In recent years, Stites’ work has been featured in Voyage Magazine, Hyperallergic, Maine Arts Journal, Seymour Magazine, and ‘100 degrees in the shade: a survey of south Florida art.’

Stites has just been nominated as one of 10 artists for the 2022 Florida Prize at the Orlando Museum of Art. Her work will be shown there in May. She has a studio at Fountainhead Arts in Miami, and divides her time between Miami and Maine.