Sarah Boyts Yoder

Born and raised in Fort Worth, Sarah Boyts Yoder received a BFA in painting from Eastern New Mexico University and an MFA in painting from James Madison University in 2006. Her work has been featured in numerous publications and exhibitions throughout the US including the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art.

In 2014, she was awarded a professional fellowship and exhibition from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. Boyts Yoder has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a resident artist at 100W Corsicana in Corsicana, Texas. She was also a finalist and semi finalist for the Bethesda Painting Awards and the Trawick Art Prize. In 2019 she had her first international exhibition in Sydney, Australia and was invited to speak at the Charlottesville chapter of Creative Mornings. Her work is included in numerous private and corporate collections. Sarah lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia.

ARTIST STATEMENT: Using a visual lexicon of symbols that she has generated over time, Boyts Yoder’s colorful, abstracted works articulate how space extends and collapses all around us in liminal celebrations of cacophonous graffiti. She states, “A fleet of various icons and motifs provides points of focus in a world that all too often insists on inevitability and separateness.” These paintings offer instances of equilibrium in our chaotic environments, and by proxy, comment on the absurdity and endless possibility of meaning. Boyts Yoder thus sees her paintings as hopeful, contextual acts, and the mode of abstraction as a generous state of being.