the Mona Lisa Project
Margo Sawyer
Margo Sawyer was born in the United States and brought up in England, where she received most of her formal education. Her interest in contemporary American art led her back to the United States, where she entered the sculpture program at Yale University, and received her M.F.A. in 1982.
After completing graduate school, she spent one year in India on a Fulbright-Hays Research Grant (1982-83). She lived in Bombay and traveled throughout the country to study the ancient forms of art, architecture, and their mythological complexities. Exploring these connections soon became the most persistent underlying objective of her installation work, which place the viewer within spaces of reflection and contemplation.
In 1986-87 she was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and New York State Council for the Arts Grant for Public Art. In 1988, she joined the faculty of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. She lived for a year and a half in Japan, studying the aesthetic structure and meanings of Japan's traditional landscape design and its relationship to contemporary Installation Art.
Recently, in 2008, she completed the largest public work her career, Synchronicity of Color, at Discovery Green in Houston, 20 acre highly programmed park. The artwork stands as an artistic hybrid of sculpture, architecture, functional form and cultural icon.
© Rino Pizzi 2010