Sarah Hulsey
Sarah Hulsey was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. While studying linguistics as an undergraduate at Harvard University, she worked as a study room assistant at the Mongan Center for Prints Drawings and Photographs at the Fogg Art Museum. There she was able to handle and view hundreds works of art on paper from many of the world’s greatest artists, awakening an awareness of the conceptual power and possibilities of drawing and printmaking.
Over the next decade, her pursuit of art developed in parallel to her studies in linguistics. As she learned more about the depth and complexity of the structure of language, she became more and more drawn to the possibility of representing these structures through visual art. Eventually, she received an MFA in book arts and printmaking from the University of the Arts and a PhD in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work draws on her knowledge of the structure of language to explore this rich system in a visual domain.
Her artists books are held in over forty special collections, including Library of Congress, University of California Berkeley Bancroft Library, School of the Museum of Fine Arts library, Yale University Haas Arts Library, and the Ampersand Foundation in Johannesburg, South Africa, among others. Hulsey was a post-graduate apprentice at Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, received the 2016 Walter Feldman Fellowship for Emerging Artists in New England, and was awarded the 2020 Artist Fellowship Award for Drawing and Printmaking from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. In 2026, she was selected as one of the shortlisted artists to represent Massachusetts in A Book Art Revolution, a national exhibition to be held at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. in 2027.
My work is concerned with the architecture that underpins language, which we use effortlessly but with little awareness of its beauty and complexity. Even a simple sentence has layers and layers of organization, governed by a complex set of rules and interactions happening below the level of our conscious knowledge. Small pieces of information (atomic components, as it were) combine into ever larger units within the concurrent linguistic systems at play. These components are organized into elegant structures that exist only in the mind. In my artwork, I analyze these structures and create visual correlates, looking for poetry and resonance in the rich patterns that emerge.
I compose abstract frameworks by building up nested and connected forms set within reticulated grids. Networks of these grids serve as armatures on which small elements abut, merge, and grow into higher order objects. In these pages, the underlying structures of sentences are segmented, excerpted, and then recombined into forms reflecting their core, essential relationships.
The interconnected systems of language—sound, structure, meaning—are suggested by multiple layers in my work. There is alternating tension and harmony between the strata, created by the relation of rectilinear elements to shapes derived from circles and curves. Diagrammatic layers interact with notational markings, sound waves, crystalline forms, and schematic objects, each stratum suggesting distinct but interrelated levels of universal grammar. My work draws attention to linguistic patterns deep in our minds and their complex, hidden beauty.