It's Just a Phase
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From Dance to Image
I started dancing at age 5 and graduated from the University of Washington with a BA, BS, and the Dean’s Medal in the Arts. I moved to New York in 2009 to continue working as a dancer alongside performance art and modeling—exploring where the body could take me as both subject and medium.
Frustration with the lack of agency in other people’s work, combined with the fleeting nature of live performance, led me to pick up a camera. I began photographing myself, friends, and the city, then layering text onto images in what I called phoems, marking a shift in how I related to the image.
Reclaiming My Image
As I continued working with my image, I learned that I did not own it as a dancer or model—the photographer did. When I asked for co-copyright on images of myself, I was met with consistent refusals, often dismissively. In response, I created My Modeling Portfolio (2011), making derivative works from photographs of myself in order to reclaim both the image and the artwork. This became a foundational question in my practice: Can what a woman makes of her own image be as much “art” as what a man makes of it?
I was accepted, then rejected from West Chelsea Artist Open Studios in 2012 because my work was declared “an ad, not art,” which became the basis for Am I Not An Art/Ist?. The experience left me somewhat stunned. It made clear how the female body—especially when tied to commerce and self-production—remains problematic for much of the art world.
Online Performance
Eager to explore online performance, I created Sarah White and began offering hour-long Naked Therapy sessions via webcam. The project went viral in 2011 and has appeared in thousands of news outlets worldwide, with one Viennese journal calling me “Freud’s naked grand-daughter.” It immersed me in a global audience outside the New York art world—what was then being called social practice—while also bringing the work back into it, as the question persisted: “is it art or not?” The experience made visible how the female body and online performance remain difficult for the art world to situate.
This led to The Google Project, where I explored early internet anonymity and identity by attempting—repeatedly and unsuccessfully—to control my own search results and digital presence.
Multimedia and multipersona
I decided to pursue an MFA in Visual Art at Parsons to expand on what I had begun exploring. There, I created multimedia works for the first time, extending the image beyond a single format or medium. This included works such as Barcode (2014) and Sunset Blvd (2015), which move between physical and digital forms.
I also developed multiple onas (online personas) as a continuation of The Google Project, exploring identity as distributed and unstable across platforms.
Fourth wave feminism
My MFA thesis, The Female Painter, posits that a woman painting on an image of herself is conceptually akin to a man painting on a blank canvas. This led to curating Body Anxiety (2015), an online group exhibition of artists working with their own image, discussed in Artforum, and participating in The F-Word, a documentary on fourth-wave feminist artists in New York.
Man Hands is the term I used to describe how men artifying women receive more artistic credibility than a woman doing it to herself. Can what a woman makes of her own image be as much “art” as what a man makes of it? This question sits at the center of the work.
Chasing Celebrity
2015, @OnaArtist
As I began contemplating my exit from art school, I felt like I wanted to embark on a durational multi-year performance that would capitalize on many of the aspects of the Internet, commercialism, and female sexuality that I had explored through Naked Therapy. And so the “Celebrity Project” was born. Basically, I wanted to appropriate my own image as a celebrity, ala Richard Prince, so I started an Instagram for a model named Ona Artist who sought celebrity through any available means. The intended basis of celebrity was a rock star with an EP, album, and music career, but the mainstream proved unreceptive to Ona’s presentation. However, she was greatly embraced on social media – particularly Instagram – which has grown to over 5M followers and provided me with a trove of images and concepts through which I’ve created a large body of work that evidences my continued obsession with the issues I posited in my MFA thesis.
Working on Commission
2018, An American Dream
With my newfound social media exposure, I began working with several patrons, the biggest of whom found me on Youtube. We were soon working together in my capacity as his (non-naked) therapist as well as on some mutual artistic collaborations, as he was a talented photographer/drawer and the son of a very well known artist. Our main project together was called An American Dream, which is the story, told in photos and captions, of a model working with a private producer and navigating the attentions and tensions of that complicated yet profitable process. This experience led to a varied body of work that includes photography, narrative, and the presence and absence of the body.
Selling My Art
2019, The Shows
Through these collaborations and increased attention from gallerists, I began showing at museums and making a living off selling my work via international art fairs, galleries, and private sales off my website. The experience expanded my abilities to materialize my work and gave me an education in mounting shows, shipping art, and negotiating with collectors and gallerists. The hard work and tough decisions I’d made in the ten years since I’d arrived in NYC, broke and dreamy, finally started paying off.
