SaraNoa Mark

Through delicate drawings and carved ceramic reliefs, SaraNoa Mark’s practice examines the traces left by time upon landscapes and within collective memory. Exploring themes of permanence and erasure, Mark’s work employs subtractive gestures to consider how intangible experiences might be preserved through material form. Engaging with carved languages and historical sources, from canyons and cuneiform tablets to Seljuk architecture, Assyrian palace reliefs and Talmudic manuscripts, the artist weaves these influences into artefact-like compositions that evoke archaeological fragments and imagined terrains. Working primarily with wet clay, Mark repeatedly carves and scores its surface, echoing the incremental processes through which geological strata form and landscapes are shaped over time. In this way, material becomes both medium and archive, allowing Mark to explore the enduring impulse to inscribe stories into place and the capacity of objects to carry memory across time.

Mark was born in 1991 in New York. They received a BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2015, a Fulbright Research Award in Turkey in 2019–20, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023. Mark has received numerous awards, including the Artadia Award (2023) and Harpo Foundation Grant for Visual Artists (2024). Residencies include Wave Hill, New York (2023); Yaddo, New York (2025); Dieu Donné, New York (2025); and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Connecticut (2025), with a forthcoming studio residency at the Monira Foundation, New Jersey (2026–27). Recent solo presentations include Evaporated Hours, Dreamsong, Minneapolis (2025); Two Noons, Goldfinch Gallery at NADA New York (2025); and Guarding the Past, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, Chicago (2026). Mark currently lives and works in New York.