About

Sarah Levy was born in 1989 in Portland, Oregon. She began drawing in 2013 as a means of coping with the trauma of her mother’s sudden death. In that time she took classes from Portland artist Phil Sylvester.

In 2014-2015 she worked as a journalist in Palestine and Greece. While there she also drew portraits of many of the people she met and interviewed, experimenting with how visual art can be combined with journalism.

Back in the U.S. in late 2015, in response to then-candidate Trump’s misogyny, Sarah used her own menstrual blood and a tampon to paint the portrait “Whatever” (Bloody Trump). The painting quickly went viral and was covered by major news sources around the globe before being acquired by the Bundeswehr Museum of Military History in Dresden, Germany.

In 2020 Sarah got her MFA in Drawing from the New York Academy of Art.

She has been teaching drawing at The Drawing Studio in Portland, OR since 2022 and she absolutely loves it. When she is not drawing or teaching drawing Sarah can be found playing music, performing comedy, volunteering as a grief counselor, and dancing around town in a giant purple cardboard mask.

For more information on Sarah and her teaching philosophy, listen to this episode of the Creative Commute podcast :)

Artist Statement

I believe in the power of beauty and in the beauty of faces. My hope is that there is some magic in a drawing that can make the viewer stop for a second longer to look, and in that second there is the possibility to see more deeply and the possibility to reassess preconceived notions that might only be reaffirmed in a passing glance at a photograph.

In my portraiture I typically depict the faces of people who are often ignored, silenced, or vilified by popular media: a child in Gaza whose parents were murdered in an Israeli bomb attack; a young man from Ferguson, Missouri who was murdered by police; the great German revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg. Through choosing these subjects for my art I aim to highlight the importance of these people—to learn from, to remember, to recognize, and to see how they might be relatable to ourselves. In this way I hope to reclaim a sort of grassroots radical history as well as to grasp and hold a light to the current moment.

I also think there is an inherent power in faces. In their curves, lines, folds, and shadows, and in what deep emotion just minor variances can suggest. By drawing out the spirit and beauty of one face that the viewer might not have stopped and looked at before, I hope to plant a seed for how we look at people and how we learn to see each other.

Sarah Levy

May 2018

“Art is necessary in order that man should be able to recognize and change the world. But art is also necessary by virtue of the magic inherent in it.”

—Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art

"Yet why should an artist's way of looking at the world have any meaning for us? Why does it give us pleasure? Because, I believe, it increases our awareness of our own potentiality. Not of course our awareness of our potentiality as artists ourselves. But a way of looking at the world implies a certain relationship with the world, and every relationship implies action. The kind of actions implied vary a great deal...

A work of art can, to some extent, increase an awareness of different potentialities in different people. The important point is that a valid work of art promises in some way or another the possibility of an increase, an improvement. Nor need the word be optimistic to achieve this; indeed, its subject may be tragic. For it is not the subject that makes the promise, it is the artist's way of viewing his subject. Goya's way of looking at a massacre amounts to the contention that we ought to be able to do without massacres."

-John Berger, Collected Essays