Artist and Author: Sarah Cain
Design: Purtill Family Business
Editors: Sarah Cain & Ian Berry

Published in 2021

13.25 x 10.25 inches (33.7 x 26 cm), 64 pages, hardcover

ISBN: 9780998861692

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Music Book is a 64-page facsimile artist’s book by Sarah Cain, comprising a series of colorful abstractions painted directly over a collection of vintage sheet music. The original book of music was found in Switzerland and Cain’s paintings within collide with and respond to the previous owner’s handwritten notes. Music Book is an extension of Cain’s works on paper that balance her installation and large-scale painting practice: these works are intimate meditations; intricate and small-scale.

Cain has been painting Music Book since 2008 and has carried it through three studios. “It is this journal of time that you can open up, start, close, put away, like a diary.”

The book is co-published by X Artists' Books and the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum on the occasion of Cain's exhibition, Sarah Cain—Enter the Center.

Sarah Cain is an artist who explores and expands upon traditional ideas of painting. Cain works on canvases of all sizes, often modifying surfaces by cutting and braiding, altering and disfiguring a composition until the original image is no longer recognizable. Sarah Cain earned her MFA at the University of California at Berkeley in California and her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Aspen Art Museum; and Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh. Exhibitions of her work are being presented in 2021 at The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, the Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas; and at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College. A 2020 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painter & Sculptors Grant, Cain currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Ian Berry is Dayton Director of the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery and Professor of Liberal Arts at Skidmore College. He has organized over 100 museum exhibitions for the Tang and museums across the United States. Berry is a regular speaker on interdisciplinary, inventive curatorial practice and teaching in museums and is well known for publications including monographs on artists Terry Adkins, Nancy Grossman, Corita Kent, Nicholas Krushenick, Dona Nelson, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Alma Thomas, Fred Tomaselli and Kara Walker.

The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College invites curiosity and collaborative learning through active engagement with ideas, artworks, and exhibitions.

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