Margo Sawyer

It was a typical hot and muggy Texas day when I made the 45-minute drive from Austin to Elgin. I was on my way to visit artist Margo Sawyer for the second time, almost exactly one year after the first time I had been in her studio. Sawyer was recently named a recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts, an award meant to help developing scholars and artists engage in research and creation. The fellowship is given to artists who have already demonstrated exceptional production and creativity in the arts, a distinction that can only be used to summarize the more than 30 years of Sawyer’s artistic production, her time as an educator, and her advocacy...

Margo Sawyer, the Elgin-based artist whose art intersects sculpture and architecture, has won a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation recently announced 173 fellowships (including two joint fellowships) in arts and sciences for 2018. This honor comes with up to $45,000 to support one of the winners’ future projects.

“The Guggenheim Fellowship would allow me time and resources to cultivate designs of spaces transcendent,” Sawyer says. “Public places that foster contemplation.”...

Margo Sawyer’s artistic practice investigates the relationship between space and transcendence; the places where architecture and ritual converge to create transcendent qualities that encourage a state of contemplation within the viewer. The central actor in her work is color. Sawyer’s practice bridges site-specific installations and public art to transform mundane architectural structures into euphoric icons, join exquisite objects and materials into domestic spaces, and turn large public spaces into intimate refuges. Sawyer’s art unites the complex and unexpected, where the physical, material, perceptual, and psychological effects of color interact...

On the first floor of the century-old red brick building on the corner of a historic block in downtown Elgin, English artist Margo Sawyer works in her studio, a 3,000-square foot-white box. From here, she creates plans for large-scale installations of her signature powder-coated steel boxes in vibrant hues that can be seen around the world, from Kosovo to Houston, where her “Synchronicity of Color” at Discovery Green is a popular photo spot. Sawyer, an art professor at the University of Texas for almost thirty years, moved to Elgin in 1998 and in 2002 bought the building, which was once a grocery store in the early 1900s—she affectionately calls it the “Bright & Early” building after the faded hand-painted sign on the side...

Crowded public art openings at galleries are not ideal for spending quality time with art, but sometimes you take what you can get.

And sometimes a work will sneak up on you and lock you in for a surprising moment, despite the distractions.

When a new season kicks in, like it has in this post-holiday week, you may find yourself at openings while also vowing (to yourself, to an artist, to the gallerist) that you’ll be back on a quieter day to take another look. How many times have we thought and said this and not followed up? We mean to. But then the next round of openings happens the following weekend, and then the next, and obligations pile up while time is squeezed...

Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas is pleased to announce the opening of Reflect, by Austin-based sculptor Margo Sawyer. A reception for the artist will be held Saturday, November 18, from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. The exhibition continues through February 3, 2018.

Throughout her career, Margo Sawyer has created installations which translate sacred spaces into a contemporary vocabulary. The central actor of Sawyer’s art is color.  Reflect 2017, is a large-scale floor installation that converses with the architecture in an ever-changing way, with the play of light and reflection moving throughout the space and uniting an array of complex and unexpected unions of color. Reflect, holds fragments of a career long fascination with glass, its optical color play, how transparency, reflectivity, luminosity, physicality, materiality, perceptual, material and shape affect the psychological effects of color, as a window into our emotions. Elements of the work were produced by the artist in residence at Pilchuck Glass School and recently at Franz Mayer of Munich, Germany in 2106...

Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas is pleased to announce the opening of IT'S OFFICIAL, an exhibition honoring the recent appointments of four contemporary artists, as "Texas State Artists for 2015 & 2016"...

Margo Sawyer's work process is one of ecsalating complexcity...

There's a synchronicity to Margo awyer's life that has led this multifaceted artist from tragedy to joy...

Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas is pleased to announce Synchronicity of Color by sculptor Margo Sawyer...