here. now. close.

I’m excited to announce a new installation, here. now. close. at the Project Space at the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum. The show runs from May 9 - August 3, 2025 with a public opening on May 23rd from 7-10 pm. I’ll be giving an artist talk on June 15th 1-2pm in the Dobson Lecture Hall.

here. now. close. is a relational sound and object installation based on the simple shape of a heart. The title is inspired by research into neural bereavement – a term that describes the changes in the brain when grieving. The work traces our experience of loss through three dimensions: space (here), time (now), and attachment (close).* The installation pays special attention to the last measurement—closeness—outlining the invisible contours of grief.

Costumes of Absence / Orchestra of Bodies is a series of vessels made by blowing glass into a reusable mold. Originating in early death practices, mold making was used to create masks of the deceased, a way to represent or repeat something that was lost. Here, the ‘mother-mold’ is a combination of welded metal hearts that typify the coiled scroll work and common decorative pattern found on fences in the Southwest. The sculptures refer to the domestic symbolism of this familiar shape while conjuring the image of a hollow, pumping organ. Like a working heart, the mold bears repetitive action, the inflation of hot-glass pushing into the open voids of the metal shapes. The process of making the vessels, the physical actions, endurance and the collaboration between breath and body becomes committed to muscle memory. The glass vessels are like relics, representing their own presence and the absence of the mold that formed them.

The resonant sounds of the vessel’s interior curves and folds play from two speakers situated across the gallery from one another. Rubber tubing, the kind often used in glass blowing, directs air across the openings of the vessels to produce a low-pitched hum. The individual sounds are recorded and layered, referring to the solitary and communal aspects of the act of glass blowing, while mirroring the ways we experience grief. Echoes of abstraction, spatial and atmospheric activation combine to become an expression of loss. Sound asks the viewer to participate in the intimate act of listening, to internalize it, a practice that over time builds closeness.

*O’Connor PhD, Mary-Frances. The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss. Harper Collins, 2023.

Audio recording by Michael Carbajal / Audio produced, mixed and mastered by Dominic Valencia

Shows on Mothering..

I had a really busy year and am late to update this news section!

I was in two dream-come-true shows this year on a subject close to me: motherhood. I was thrilled to be included in Notes on Motherhood at ASU Art Museum in Tempe (my alma mater), curated by Brittany Corrales. The show included work from the collection as well as work from contemporary artists based in Arizona and “explores various stages of matrescence, or “mother-becoming” –– from birth and caregiving to grief and loss. The exhibition challenges the narrow depictions of mothers and mothering within art history and visual culture.” (from the ASU website) You can read more about this show here.

I was so honored to be included in the groundbreaking show, Designing Motherhood at The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. The show in Houston was the fifth version co-organized by curator Sarah Darro. It was created by a group of curators and researchers including; Michelle Millar Fisher, Amber Winick, Juliana Rowen Barton, Gabriella Nelson and Zoe Greggs.

From the Craft Houston website: “Handcrafted objects are the intermediary space between the womb and the world. From handwoven swaddling cloths and knitted baby blankets to embroidered baby carriers and basket-woven bassinets, craft is often the first human experience of the material world,” notes HCCC Curator and Exhibitions Director Sarah Darro. “HCCC’s presentation of Designing Motherhood draws out the intertwined properties of labor, care, embedded history, material intelligence, and intergenerational knowledge shared by craft and parenthood, ultimately asserting such reproductive experiences as forms of craft themselves.”

Read more here.

Convening: Mothering + Creativity at MOCA Tucson

I was honored to participate in an Artist Panel and breakout discussions called Mothering + Creativity at MOCA Tucson. The panel included myself, Fay Ray, Amber Doe, Anh Thuy Nguyen, Liz Cohen and was moderated by Natalie Brewster Nguyen. It was a powerful group of Artists!

The Convening happened because of the hard work of Deputy Director, Co-Chief Curator and Mother Laura Copelin, Curator Alexis Wilkinson and the dedicated staff. It was amazing to see such a big turn-out, to see the desire for programming related to parenting + art. It was beautiful to see who in our community resonates with these acts of mothering and creating and to hear their specific experiences, both the good and the challenging. MOCA Tucson so generously provided childcare during the event…childcare at a contemporary art museum! Exo Coffee, La Estrella Bakery and others in our community generously provided food and coffee for everyone!

Thank you to all of the mothers and supporters who participated. Thank you for listening and for sharing food and stories. It was great to really see you.

Sara Hubbs & Sarah Zapata: between gravity and ground at MOCA Tucson!

I am so very excited that I have my first two-person museum show opened February 2nd at MOCA Tucson in Tucson, AZ. I am honored to show work alongside artist Sarah Zapata and to have the opportunity to work with curator Alexis Wilkinson.

Here’s an excerpt of Alexis’ writing from MOCA Tucson’s website:

“Between gravity and ground is an exhibition that features glass and textile works by artists Sara Hubbs and Sarah Zapata who combine craft-based techniques with experimental processes to create objects that merge familiar and ambiguous. Together, their artworks converge in a constellation of strange forms, vibrant colors, and an abundance of textures to conjure a space of fantasy and possibility.

Sara Hubbs takes an intuitive approach to working with glass, using improvisational processes to produce collections of tactilely-rich objects. She often makes vessels  – containers that map the contours of absence – to consider the act of holding space within caretaking and grief. Her works are formed with objects that reflect her roles as parent and kin such as medical tubing, architectural features, toy packaging, bows, and body parts. Attending to the ways we shape one another, she uses multi-step casting, slumping, and firing methods that alter her material references, resulting in varied states of legibility, distortion, and abstraction. The soft curves and hard surfaces of her sculptures evoke multiple associations such as shiny oversized candies and draping fabric, snaking riverbeds and translucent topographies, or brightly hued internal organs and mysterious organic matter.”

Check out installation images here.

Generous support for this exhibition is provided by an AMPLIFY CREATIVITY GRANT from the ARTEZONA Foundation; University of Arizona Institute for LGBTQ+ Studies; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Arizona Commission on the Arts; and MOCA Tucson’s Board of Trustees, Ambassador Council, and Members. In-kind support provided by Rune Wines and Exo Roast Coffee, Co.

Recipient of THE AMPLIFY CREATIVITY GRANT from ARTEZONA!

Great news…I am a recipient of THE AMPLIFY CREATIVITY GRANT from the ARTEZONA FOUNDATION! I am very grateful for this grant and the timing of it. This grant will help me expand my practice and make new work for my first museum show (more on that later). I can’t wait to share the work I’ve made with the support of ARTEZONA.

To find out more about this grant and the ARTEZONA FOUNDATION visit www.artezona.org

and follow on Instagram @artezonagallery and @artezona.foundation

New Glass Review 42

I haven’t done a News post in a while and I wanted to highlight some amazing things that happened this past year. My piece, “Weaning Fountain” was included in The Corning Museum of Glass’ yearly publication, New Glass Review 42!

From The Corning Museum of Glass: “New Glass Review is an annual exhibition-in-print featuring 100 of the most timely, innovative projects in glass produced during the year. It is curated from an open call for submissions by the curator of postwar + contemporary glass at The Corning Museum of Glass and a changing panel of guest curators. 

In 2020, 927 individuals and companies from 50 countries submitted 2,501 digital images. All entries, including those that were not selected for publication, are archived in the Museum's Rakow Research Library.”

Thank you to the curators: Susie J. Silbert, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Glass, The Corning Museum of Glass / Simón Ballen Botero, designer, Medellín, Colombia, and Amsterdam, Netherlands / Sarah Darro, independent curator and Gallery Manager, Center for Craft, Asheville, North Carolina / Erika Diamond, artist and Assistant Director of Galleries Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, New York 

Finalist: The Hopper Prize!!!!

I was stunned to find out I was chosen as a finalist for the Spring Hopper Prize! Thank you to the organization and also to the amazing jurors: Pamela Meadows, Curator at Boulder Museum of Art, and Jody Graf, Assistant Curator at MoMA PS1. Check out my online portfolio here!

In the Archives: The Pandemic Mother Map

Pandemic Mother Map during the early stages of Covid-19. It was funded by the “Pandemidiarios On the Border” grant program through the @confluencenter at The University of Arizona. Centered in the Sonoran Desert, the projects responded to living through Covid-19, in this particular place. Tucson Weekly and Alexandra Pere recently covered Pandemidiarios and my project was featured! The projects were also recently archived in the Special Collections at the library at the University of Arizona. You can see the project by clicking here.

Inspired by the story that my Great-Great-Grandmother emigrated from Altar, Sonora, Mexico, to Phoenix during and ‘epidemic’, "Pandemic Mother Map" visualizes the cyclical nature of pandemics through the my own ancestral line across five generations, my families movement through the Sonoran Desert, and the occurrence of three global pandemics (epidemics) spanning 131 years.

This idea came about because of the burden the pandemic placed on mothers. I saw my friends and family struggling in different ways while reading about mothers leaving the workforce in record numbers. Personally, I had so many questions about how to help my child through Covid beyond homeschooling. “What did she need from me?” At the same time I was struggling with how to help my mother who was in the hospital in a different city. “How do I keep the people I love safe?” It was in those moments I thought about my Grandmothers, especially my most favorite human ever, my Grandma Preach and how incredibly strong she was. I kept thinking, this is not new, so why don’t we know what to do??? My relatives experienced epidemics and pandemics, the times they lived in saw the “Russian Flu”, smallpox, and the Flu of 1918 and yet, here I am. I became curious about the deeper time of Pandemics and the resulting movement of women across borders, in and out of certain sectors of society, and the deep and hidden work we do to care for others.

Odd Room @ Millville Studios

I recently curated our first show in the project space at our studio building, Millville Studios. Tucson really turned out for the one night event. It was an incredible experience all around. You can find a short description of the show below and a link to install photos here taken by the incredible Maya Hawk.

I’m incredibly grateful to work with and make art alongside the artists included in the exhibition: Susanna Battin, Erik Schmahl, C.E. Fitzgerald, Ryan Hill & myself.

Odd Room highlights the work of the five resident artists at Millville Studios working in separate spaces, but under one roof during this stretch of the Covid-19 Pandemic. The show is situated in the basement of the building and takes inspiration from Weronika Zielinska-Klein’s “Guestroom Project,” where she invited artists to work in the “odd room” in her family’s home. The project was interpreted as being born of her experience as a new mother, her embodiment of maternal care colliding and informing her artistic practice and vice versa*. Odd Room is an opportunity to engage as a community of artists, highlight new modes of working and connecting while experiencing new life rhythms, performing new rituals of care and inhabiting spaces anew. The show honors the way we negotiate our new realities, where time operates differently and things may be awkward, provisional, or vague and where artists are encouraged to make the odd work.

Curated by: Sara Hubbs

*Epp Buller, R. & Reeve, C. (2019). Hospitality as Ethical and Creative Responsiveness in the Work of Weronika Zielinska-Klein, Inappropriate Bodies, Art, Design, and Maternity (p. 336). Demeter Press

Soft shoulder at Everybody

I’m incredibly excited to share install images from my solo show, Soft shoulder at Everybody in Tucson, AZ. The gallery returned to Tucson after opening a space in Chicago. Tucson is so happy to have Everybody back home and I am grateful to work with them. It’s a great space and I am so proud of Soft shoulder!

I am honored to have an exhibition essay written by Lauren R. O’Connell, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. Here’s an excerpt:

“Soft shoulder presents a series of sculptural situations by artist Sara Hubbs that use a variety of medium and are conceptually grounded in the transformative qualities of relationships. At the center of Hubbs’ installations are vessel-like glass objects molded from plaster casts of plastic structures shaped using her daughter’s toy packaging—Barbie and the Rockers, Hello Kitty, LOL dolls, and so on. As a parent working from home, the discarded plastic became available material loaded with meaning and prompted the artist to consider the cyclical nature of inanimate objects and human relationships.”


Install image courtesy of Everybody. Photo credit: Maya Hawk





Painting At Night

Two very special pieces of mine were chosen by juror Melanie Cooper Pennington for the 2nd Annual Exhibition, “Painting at Night” at Artlink Gallery in Fort Wayne, IN in collaboration with The Artist Mother Podcast. I’m happy to be showing one of my Weaning Vessels, Doll, as well as a new video piece called Weaning Vessel: Fountain. Thank you to Kayla Buyten of The Artist Mother Podcast for providing the platform, opportunity and always elevating Mother Artists. Here’s a bit about the show from the Artlink website:

“In collaboration with Artist/Mother Podcast, Artlink is pleased to host Painting at Night, a group exhibition that was juried by Melanie Cooper Pennington and open internationally to artists identifying as mothers or lifelong caregivers.

The theme for this exhibition was accumulated during episode 28 of the Artist Mother Podcast, a conversation between host, Kaylan Buteyn, and artist Allison Reimus. In the episode, Allison recalls the time she read a statement in a New York Times article about how “You can’t paint at night in your kitchen and hope to be a good artist. It doesn’t work that way.”  

In true Artist/Mother fashion, this seemed like a great statement to respond to for a group show, as an act of resistance and rejection. To imply that good art cannot be made in domestic spaces, or that a person cannot claim the title of artist without meeting arbitrary requirements is a patriarchal myth, one that artists who are mothers have been resisting for decades.

Over 400 artworks were submitted to this call. The juror, Melanie Cooper Pennington, narrowed down the exhibition to 63 works by 54 artists, with a broad range of media including painting, drawing, printmaking, ceramic, sculpture, texiles, installation and video.”

Artists: Lisa Alonzo, Robin Assner-Alvey, Cassie Arnold, Joanna Bavero, Erin Boake, Amy Branch-Lambert, Sarah Meyers Brent, Kim Cardoso, Kristy Cavaretta, Allyson Darakjian, Krista Dedrick-Lai, Jillian Dickson, Beth Dixon Welch, Kate Eggleston, Lauren Frances Evans, Jean Gray Mohs, Nicole Havekost, Jodi Hays, Norah Howell, Sara Hubbs, Bethany Kenyon, Alexandra Kiss, Marrin Lee Martinez, Madeleine LeMieux, Jess Levey, Tai Lipan, Jill Nicole Luton, Kelly Marshall, Jennifer Mendoza Stanelle, Kellianne McCarthy, Erin McCluskey Wheeler, Emily Moll Wood, Sarah Paulsen, Catherine Reinhart, Leslie Renn, Renee Romero, Laura Rosengren, Liz Rundorff Smith, Lauren Salazar, Nora Schuchat, Lauren Scott Corwin, Jordan Sheridan, Claire Sherwood, Megan Shope, Kari Smith, Angie Stalker, Isadora Stowe, Jacquelyn Strycker, Yael Villafranca, Dara Weyna, Paige Whitney, Maliheh Zafarnezhad, Emily Zarse, and Stefanie Zito.

Sara Hubbs, 2021, Weaning Vessel: Fountain, video still.

Artist Parent Index

I’m honored to be a part of an incredible project founded in 2016 by artist Sarah Irvin called the Artist Parent Index. It is “a searchable database of artists making work about their experiences with reproduction (from the Instagram page for Artist Parent Index).” You can check out my entry here. Follow The Artist Parent Index on Instagram!

CARE

You can still see the online show Care hosted by Dear Artists Project. I’m so honored my work was included in the show co-curated by Benz Amataya founder of the Dear Artists Project and Kaylen Buteyn from the Artist Mother Podcast.

Instagram handles: @dearartists @artistmotherpodcast

Text from the website:

“Caring for others can often come at the expense of caring for ourselves and can trigger depression, panic, worry, and mental disorders that threaten our health. From holding a newborn who feels so fragile, to helping a sick or elderly person who relies on you so heavily, managing the lives of others makes our plates full. Looming responsibilities, figuring out medical tasks we don’t feel prepared for, uncertainty about the future, fear of losing a loved one, lacking resources or wisdom to help those we love...there are so many ways our own stress and anxiety is compounded because we care.

Caring for ourselves and caring about social issues that are important to us can also be a source of anxiety. Are we fitting in the right amount of exercise, sleep, nutritious food, reading, vacationing, etc. Are we listening to what consumerism and the world tells us we need to do to care for ourselves and is that causing even more anxiety? Are we doing enough to contribute to the changes that we need to see in our society? How do we cope with seeing so much suffering in the world?”

Congrats to all of the artists!

Brianna Hernández, Katherine Brown, Stefanie Zito, Taiessa Pagola, Tamara Zibners, Holly Romano, Amy Branch-Lambert, Michela Martello, Cat Gunn, Alicia Sampson Ethridge, McKenzie Drake, Alice Stone-Collins, Casaundra Beard, Anna Armella, Jess Levey, Lauren Herzak-Bauman, Lisa Marie Moriarty, Rebecca Ackermann, Sue Watt, Taylor Lee Nicholson, Jessica Caldas

LECMO @ The Sonoran Glass School

On Friday September 10th, 2021 I was honored to give my first LECMO at The Sonoran Glass School. LECMO is a combo ‘Lecture’ (or Artist Talk) and a ‘Demo’ in the Hotshop. I gave a brief talk before I made two mold-blown glass pieces in front of an audience.

The first piece was from my series “Weaning Vessels” and the second piece was made with a new process to really showcase experimentation and collaboration. The mold was made from my hand clasping my daughter’s. Jason Marstall and I made two separate, different colored bubbles to blow at the same time in the mold. We were assisted by Lauren Steinert, Tom Hodgson and Paul Anders-Stout (who also was the MC for the event). You can see in the photos we used ‘puffers’ (they look like the end of a blood pressure cuff) because of Covid. I actually learned to blow glass this way and not in a traditional way of using your mouth to inflate the glass.

Thank you to the Sonoran Glass School and Director Lynne Davis for your invitation and your support! Thank you to all friends, family, and glass/art lovers who attended!

Artist Profile in Southwest Contemporary

I’m excited to share I was selected for an Artist Profile in the Fall 2021 issue of Southwest Contemporary. My work was chosen for the issue themed Inhale. Exhale. by guest juror Julio Cesar Morales, artist and senior curator at Arizona State University Art Museum. A pdf of the profile is available here.

I am honored that Publisher and Editor-in-chief, Lauren Tresp, wrote the profile. Here’s a taste:

“From assemblages of these raw materials, the artist creates plaster molds and then uses breath to inflate molten glass into slouching, bulging, and gleaming forms and vessels. Some of the objects become zombie-like in their glassy refusal to die. Others are voluptuous and effulgent, with shapely lumps and folds of skin.”

There are many incredible artists included in this issue. Congratulations to my fellow artists!

KAYLA COLLYMORE + DONNA CRUMP, APOLO GOMEZ, WEN-HANG LIN, ELLEN BABCOCK, STEFAN JENNINGS BATISTA, DANIEL HOJNACKI, ALEXANDRA LECHIN, ALEJANDRO MACIAS, JULIA C. MARTIN, DALLIN MAYBEE, JILL O’BRYAN, ROSALINDA PACHECO, AUGUSTINE ROMERO, BRENDA STUMPF, ROSSITZA TODOROVA, EVERTON TSOSIE

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