19 Facts About Sari Dienes

Sari Dienes was a Hungarian-born American artist.

Sari Dienes's mother, Etelka Stegmuller, was of Swiss and German parentage and was a relative of the celebrated opera singer Etelka Gerster.

Sari Dienes was appointed assistant director of the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts London in 1936.

Sari Dienes recruited the school's first students, Leonora Carrington and Stella Snead, and employed Henry Moore to teach a course in modeling in clay at the school in 1938.

In September 1939 Sari Dienes travelled to New York for a brief visit but was prevented from returning to Europe by the outbreak of the Second World War.

Sari Dienes helped Ozenfant establish his new art school at 208 East 20th Street in New York, where she taught until 1941.

Sari Dienes later taught drawing and composition at the Parsons School of Design and the Brooklyn Museum Art School.

In 1961 Sari Dienes moved to the Gate Hill Cooperative at Stony Point, New York, a rural community established in 1954 by Paul and Vera Williams.

In 1977 Sari Dienes helped establish the downtown pub, The Ear Inn with Rip Hayman and Paco Underhill, which became her New York City home base.

Sari Dienes lived at Stony Point until her death in 1992.

Sari Dienes was using all manner of natural and man-made detritus in her works.

In 1956 Sari Dienes began to construct complex assemblages of glass bottles held together with epoxy resin, which she called 'Bottle Gardens'.

Sari Dienes' pioneering role in assemblage was acknowledged by her inclusion in the American Federation of Arts touring exhibition Art and the Found Object in 1959 and The Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1961.

In 1964 Sari Dienes created an assemblage on a grand scale in her mixed-media installation A Surrounding at the Smolin Gallery, New York, a labyrinth of plastic sheeting, netting, charred wood, ropes, lighting elements and a zebra skin.

Sari Dienes continued to work with found materials throughout her career, using driftwood, shells, bones, seed pods, bottles and mirrored glass, tin cans and other scrap metal, and impermanent materials such as flower petals and tumble-dryer lint.

At a residency at Yaddo artists' retreat at Saratoga Springs in the spring of 1953, Sari Dienes made a large number of monoprints by taking rubbings from textured surfaces using a printmaker's brayer.

Sari Dienes continued to experiment with materials into her seventies and eighties, exploring such divergent paths as the emergent colour Xerox technology and painting on snow.

Sari Dienes believed that even the humblest of materials could be transformed into a work of art: 'Spirit lives in everything.

Sari Dienes was an enormous influence on younger artists than her like Carolee Schneemann and Ray Johnson who, in turn, have now become important influencers of young artists today interested in body performance and social media, respectively.