‘Sunflower’ (c.1954) by Sari Dienes, ink on Webril on matmount [courtesy of the Sari Dienes Foundation copyright © Sari Dienes Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York, NY]

On the Sidewalk

The Seminal Street Art of Sari Dienes

Remy Dean
3 min readOct 1, 2024

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During a career spanning six decades, Sari Dienes worked in a wide range of media, creating paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, textile designs, sets and costumes for theatre and dance, sound-art installations, mixed-media environments, music and performance art.

In her series of large-scale Sidewalk Rubbings of the 1950s and 1960s, Dienes created bold, graphic, geometrical compositions, via impressions of manhole covers, subway gratings and other elements of the urban streetscape. This she did often in the middle of the night to avoid pedestrians, accompanied by some of Manhattan’s most famous artist friends who helped her stretch her 30-foot-long fabrics onto the sidewalk.

She lived and worked alongside a stellar circle, including: Yoko Ono, John Cage, Andy Warhol, choreographer Merce Cunningham, experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek, as well as collaborators such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly.

large-scale rubbings on fabric by Sari Dienes: ‘Soho Sidewalk ‘ (1953), ‘Menomonie 7’ (c.1966) [both courtesy of the Sari Dienes Foundation copyright © Sari Dienes Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York, NY] and ‘Manhole Wild II’ (c.1954) [photographed on display at the exhibition ‘Sari Dienes: Incidental Nature’ at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, 2023]

Dienes was known for making the exterior world her canvas, taking her materials out of the studio and into the streets. This central idea to her work, of making the outside world…

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Remy Dean
Signifier : Six : Shot : Gallery

Author, Artist, Lecturer in Creative Arts & Media. ‘This, That, and The Other’ fantasy novels published by The Red Sparrow Press. https://linktr.ee/remydean