Come in, sit, stay a while: How alum Sarah Cain invites visitors into her paintings

Los Angeles-based artist Sarah Cain never plans her works. To plan means they would be less alive, less real, less her. Plus, plans never go the way they’re supposed to, anyway. Something always gets in the way or breaks or plain doesn’t pan out. Instead, she arrives on site, in hot pink Nikes and a list of the paints she needs, and gets to work.

“I like the pressure and risk involved,” said Cain, who earned her master of fine arts degree from UC Berkeley in 2006. “I try not to think. I get fleeting visions right before I know what to do, and I try to act and respond. They’re all about staying present and flexible.” 

In the atrium of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) lives Cain’s newest artwork, a vibrant site-specific installation titled “Atrium Projects / Sarah Cain: To — you know — you.” It stretches across the wall and floor, bright swathes of color pulling visitors to move in closer, to immerse themselves in it. Two painted sofas sit along the walls, where a pair of pink Nikes hang. There’s a small mounted canvas, a row of four vases and a triangular stained glass window inserted into the existing architecture that looks out onto Oxford Street. 

“I like pushing what painting is, what painting is to different people, how you can engage with anyone from any walk of life,” she said. “I want to break the painting out of its preciousness.” 

Cain grew up in upstate New York, and at 15, dropped out of high school. She would spend a lot of her free time visiting museums, by herself or with her friends. “I didn’t really know about art,” she said. “I just knew I was an artist.” Much of the time, staring at the art mounted perfectly on the white walls in silence, Cain remembers feeling like she was in a cemetery. “Everything felt dead,” she said. She didn’t want that feeling to come from anything she created.

There were times, though, when the art moved her in unexpected ways. Like one day, when she drove for hours to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to see an exhibition of abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko’s artwork. As she stood in a room of his yellow paintings, she burst into tears. “I didn’t know anything about him, that he had died by suicide, but I felt it in his paintings,” she said. 

Cain later attended several art schools — in New York, Paris and finally, at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she got her bachelor’s degree — and eventually landed in Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice in 2004. It was a place of great independent creativity, where she had the time and space to explore her practice. The Richmond Field Station, where graduate students have their studios, “was a world within itself,” she said. She took a feminist studies course with professor and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha, which Cain deems “the best class she’s ever taken.” 

In the two decades since, Cain has created hundreds of artworks — from huge installations in public spaces, like a 150-foot-long stained glass wall at the San Francisco International Airport, to intimate pieces in museums, including small, densely layered canvases incorporating found objects such as chain link, prisms and sand. 

A lot of Cain’s art is ephemeral, staying up for months or years, sometimes even decades, and then being destroyed for something else to take its place. She began this practice early in her career, when she made dozens of paintings in abandoned buildings. She went on to create scores of large-scale immersive artworks, including the 2023 site-specific architectural intervention “Day after day on this beautiful stage” at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, which transformed the museum’s double-height East Gallery by covering the walls and floor in a single, monumental painting. It was up for five months, then painted over. Bits and pieces from the works might be saved and sold, but for the most part, the main work is lost, a memory that encapsulates a certain moment in her life. 

“They’re in an in-between,” she said. “Life is ephemeral, and how do we come to terms with that? By just embracing it. I don’t want a warehouse full of art — that’s really heavy. You’ve got to let go of stuff.” 

Cain took the title “To — you know — you” from the dedication in poet Diane Seuss’s 2021 book, frank: sonnets, which insinuates a direct and intimate connection with her readers. Like all of Cain’s work, “To — you know — You” is for everyone — people who don’t usually go museums, other artists and poets, people who want to interact with the real world in real ways, where they can sit and reflect and talk. “Art is for the people,” she said. 

So next time you’re walking by BAMPFA, stop by, walk down the stairs into the atrium straight into Cain’s artwork and sit on the couches, bathed in bold strokes of bright paint. It might feel weird at first, like you’re breaking a rule, but Cain says that’s exactly what it’s for. 

“Atrium Projects / Sarah Cain: To — you know — you” will stay up until June 2027. You can get tickets for BAMPFA online or at the front desk. Admission is free for all UC Berkeley students, staff and faculty, and for all visitors every first Thursday of the month.