A World of Shine

May 13—October 22, 2022

Opening Reception: Friday, May 13, 2022 from 6 - 8 PM

Curatorial Talk with Susan Barrett and Associate Curator Margaret Rieckenberg: Saturday, May 14, 2022. Watch here.

“I fall into a world that I am pulled into; a world of depth, a world of shine.”

— Sandra Payne

Sandra Payne’s series of jewel collages are products of an experiment in vision that examine conceptions of beauty, value, and perception. Paper reproductions of precious metals and stones meticulously cut from jewelry catalogs take on their own splendor at exaggerated scales in winding, lyrical compositions. Building layers of color and orbital patterns, the artist translates the microcosm of the picture plane into the cosmic macrocosm, forming a universe unto itself. In these works, Payne provides the space to reflect on the nature of desire and the role of artifice.

After completing an undergraduate fine arts degree at Washington University Saint Louis and a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of South Florida, Sandra Payne traveled to New York City in the 1970s to join the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and later pursue a career as a public librarian. While there, she also began showing her artwork at local galleries including the influential Just Above Midtown gallery. During this period, Payne’s ongoing use of and reference to objects of opulence, precious materials, and the qualities of glitter acted as a dialogue between the self-reflexive language of postmodernism and western and non-western cultural traditions of adornment and the commune with nature.

With expertise gained from her years working in the New York Public Library system, Payne meticulously and lovingly gathered around her the ephemera of her life and her family history, which she categorized and carefully arranged in tableaus that fill her familial home in St. Louis—a work of art in its own right that stands now as an intimate view into not only the artist’s past, but the larger mid-century Black middle-class experience in the racially divided city.

A prolific but relatively unknown artist, Sandra Payne passed away in 2021, leaving behind an undiscovered oeuvre that underscores both her technical and conceptual depth. A World of Shine magnifies the alchemical aesthetic experience of her practice, presenting a selection of her widely unseen series of paper jewelry collages in tandem with examples of her sculptural and installation work set within patterned environments rendered from her collages. This exhibition endeavors to give Sandra Payne her due—to stand as testament to the manifold work of a Black woman artist whose name has not been said enough.