Schindel Creates Free-Flowing, Flying Carpet Art

Artist Sara Schindel’s childhood in Athens, Ga., involved hours operating industrial sewing machines making handbags as part of her parents’ women’s sportswear company. She recalled that once she made a teepee that was 15 feet tall appliquéd with plant motifs.

This gritty and disciplined background made way for her work as a multimedia artist and painter known for sculptures and assemblages that explore current issues like ecology, health, and the human social condition, not to mention her free-flowing flying carpets.

Schindel noted, “I love to travel and think the flying carpets are symbolic of escape to other places and realms. My travels have influenced my artmaking. I spent last summer at an art residency in Orquevaux, France. The pieces I created there were evocative of the French sunshine and beautiful location.”

Schindel considers herself an “abstract assemblage relief maker” when she’s not painting. Her style has evolved into a coherent visual language. Her work is about “joy through structure, order through play, elevating humble material, and letting shadow and depth do emotional work.”

She further explains the flying carpet theme, “I had a boyfriend in my early 20s who flew airplanes. He took me for a ride in his tiny airplane. I’ve been painting flying carpets and flying people ever since.”

She was given stacks of vintage casino playing cards and began making three-dimensional flying carpets by gluing them together in long strips and attaching them to a substrate to create movement. She then attached jewelry, beads, wire, and other embellishments to the carpets. She works spontaneously when assembling artwork. She added, “My painting projects involve much more preparation: photography and projecting images onto the canvas. I love to travel and think the flying carpets are symbolic of escape to other places.”

Schindel graduated from The John Herron School of Art of Indiana University where she majored in print making and painting. She recalled, “The graphic design students at the school suggested that the fine art students were going to starve but, I, for one, did not.”

After college, she worked in a garment manufacturing plant in Dallas designing images that were heat-transferred on garments. Her next job was in downtown Atlanta working freelance at Rich’s department store in the advertising department as a fashion stylist, booking models and photographers, accessorizing outfits, and scouting locations.

In terms of growing up in small-ish town Georgia, hers was an interfaith family with culturally different parents. Her maternal side hails from Georgia dairymen and farmers. Her paternal grandparents were New Jersey Jews, where that grandfather was vice president of Bamberger’s department store in Newark, N.J., one of the largest department stores in the world at that time. Schindel remembers her Jewish grandmother flying into Atlanta from New Jersey wearing a baby seal skin coat with a loaf of still-warm Jewish rye bread under each arm.

She summarized, “My inspiration comes from nature, spirituality, and my environment. My sister, Alice Schindel, is my greatest inspiration. Her ceramic sculpture is cerebral, thought provoking and fearless. Franz West is another inspiration. I saw his work at the Gagosian Gallery in New York a few years ago, and I literally jumped up and down.”

When Schindel is not jumping up and down, her hobbies include reading, especially seafaring adventure stories. She’s a member of the Randolph Macon Alumni Book club, even though she is not an alumnus. She belongs to an art share group that meets to discuss members’ ongoing art projects. Andy Steinman’s Art Adventure is a favorite activity as she views private collections and gallery shows with the group. The Georgia Committee, National Museum of Women in the Arts, is another group that Schindel touts.

For more information, please contact saraschindel@gmail.com.