Sarah Stolar: Selected Works from The Grief Club
Art Academy of Cincinnati / McClure Gallery
August 18 - September 26, 2025
The Grief Club is an interdisciplinary body of work presented as a fictitious nightclub and uses dark humor and irony to explore the emotions of grief. It is informed by 17th-century Dutch vanitas paintings, with their references to pleasure and the certainty of death, and the Kübler Ross model of the Five Stages of Grief, which she has personified as entertainers. They embody the Celtic tradition of keening women — paid mourners who wail lamentations, feast, dance, and perform provocative acts in a party-style funeral called "the merry wake."
In 2018, Sarah became the primary caregiver for her artist mother when she was diagnosed with advanced-stage Alzheimer’s disease. This initiated this new body of work, which continues beyond her death. While this work is autobiographical, it is also about our collective trauma. As a result of our current sociopolitical climate, we are all living in an age of loneliness and grief. This project is a body of work, but it is also a uniting idea. The Grief Club establishes a type of membership that anyone can theoretically join, thus creating a place for human connection and healing without masking the reality of grief. The work challenges our traditional experience of sadness and the appropriate methods of coping, by interpreting the raw and real ways many humans find comfort. The Grief Club tells a story of the women who inhabit this imaginary place and the feelings evoked by death and loss.
Sarah Stolar (b. 1974, Chicago, IL; she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Cincinnati, Ohio and Santa Fe, New Mexico. The breadth of her work includes painting, drawing, multimedia installation, film, video, and performance art. Rooted in a 30-year investigation of the feminine psychological narrative, common threads in her work include loss of innocence, sexuality, power, death, spirituality, and identity. Sarah is the daughter of artist and educator Merlene Schain (1948–2022), and a descendant of 19th-century German painter Adolph von Menzel and Rookwood Pottery master potter John von Menzel of the American Arts and Crafts Movement. She grew up in her mother’s art studio and award-winning art school, Schain Studios, in Cincinnati, and holds a BFA in Painting from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Sarah's work has been exhibited across the United States and internationally, with solo exhibitions at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, BGMoCA in Montevideo, and the School of Visual Arts in New York. She is an award-winning filmmaker, including Best Experimental Film at the Synergy Film Festival in New York City, and was a finalist for the Andy Warhol Award for Best Experimental Film in the U.S. Sarah also collaborates with notable artists, including Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, and Linda Mary Montano. She was Annie and Beth’s costume designer for six years, and exhibited and performed with them at numerous venues, including documenta 14 and the 53rd Venice Biennale in the Fear Society Pavilion.
Sarah has been featured in multiple media outlets, including Yale University Radio Archive, Fifty Feminist States, The Nation Magazine, Hyperallergic, Southwest Contemporary, and CNN Style. She is currently the Academic Dean and Executive Director of Academic Affairs at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.