Sarah McEneaney (b. 1955, Munich, Germany) is a Philadelphia-based artist and community activist, who is well known for creating intricately detailed and intimately autobiographical works. Working from drawings, memory, observation, imagination and photographs she makes detailed and highly colored paintings. Personal events, from the mundane to the horrific, describe universal themes as she records the daily life of an artist actively engaged in the world. Though very direct, even factual, the paintings read less as memoir and more like creative non-fiction. The scenes, moments and details are as carefully selected and edited as the formal decisions of colour, line and perspective.
After working with oil paint early in her career, McEneaney discovered that gouache and egg tempera provided the ideal medium for her, offering both intensity and a meditative process. In the last 10 years, she has increasingly worked with acrylic as well, as it allows her to explore larger-scale works. Collage techniques also frequently feature in her paintings.
Drawing from daily life, the artist’s solitary studio practice and busy urban life have become interwoven in the paintings. McEneaney documents everyday activities in intimate detail; reading, taking a nap or bath as well as the all too ordinary experiences of violent crime and a life-threatening illness - painting a life. She likes to travel and has been to numerous artists residences in the US and abroad and frequently documents the experience of being in and painting in a new environment.
Community activism also feeds McEneaney's artwork. She is a founder and board president of her local neighbourhood association in Callowhill, Philadelphia. She was also a co-founder of Reading Viaduct Project, now known as the Friends of the Rail Park. After 12 years of work, the first quarter-mile of the park on an abandoned rail line opened in 2016, with the help of this team. Today she is still part of the effort to build further phases of the Rail Park.
Sarah McEneaney graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia in 1979. Solo exhibitions have included Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA; the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; and the List Gallery, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA. McEneaney exhibits regularly with Locks Gallery, Philadelphia and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. In addition, she has participated in over 100 group shows in the USA and abroad for more than 40 years. McEneaney is the recipient of a number of grants and fellowships including the Tyrone Guthrie Centre Artist-in-Residence, Co. Monaghan, Ireland, 2023; Ballinglen Arts Foundation Fellowship, Co. Mayo, Ireland, 2016; Joan Mitchell Center Residency, New Orleans, LA 2013; Chianti Foundation Residency, Marfa, TX, 2009; Yaddo Fellowship, Saratoga Springs, NY, 2006, 1997, and 1995; Anonymous Was A Woman Grant, 2005; Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, 2000; MacDowell Colony Fellowship, Peterborough, NH, 1998; the Pew Fellowship in the Arts Grant, 1993 among others. Her work appears in the permanent collections of Bryn Mawr College, PA; State Museum of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg PA; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI ; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, among many others.