Sarah Meyohas’s Tech-Art Explores the Mechanics of Perception

The artist, whose solo show opens at Marianne Boesky gallery on May 16, uses technical wizardry to create art—all informed by her background in business.

by Julia Halperin

Photographs by Meghan Marin

May 15, 2023

The Centre Pompidou has announced the acquisition of a series of 18 NFTs from 13 prominent French and international artists. The works are set to join France's national collection of modern and contemporary art, one that has been acquiring pioneering "new media" art since the late 1970s, including work by Nam June Paik, Valie Export, Bruce Nauman, Bill Viola and Vito Acconci.

Dorian Batycka

14 February 2023

The conceptual artist, venture capitalist and 1stDibs NFT guest curator merges art and commerce in ways that Warhol never dreamed of.

BY WILLIAM FOWLER

'It shouldn’t be a surprise that easily traded JPEGs are not "safe" assets': artist Sarah Meyohas on the NFT market

The French-US artist is showing a hologram sculpture with Marianne Boesky at Art Basel

Anny Shaw

17 June 2022

Only a year after the Bitcoin network first came to life in 2015, the French-US artist Sarah Meyohas created her BitchCoin project, for which she developed her own cryptocurrency with the idea that collectors should invest directly in artists instead of works of art. The inspiration came, Meyohas says, from the invention of Bitcoin, which she describes as a “creative act”.

Pioneering Digital Artist Sarah Meyohas Gets Gallery Representation

BY SHANTI ESCALANTE-DE MATTEI

Meyohas first began incorporating blockchain technology into her artistic practice in 2015, when she debuted a project called BitchCoin. The cryptocurrency was a conceptual project that played on the idea of investing directly in artists instead of in particular works of art. The token is now considered a proto-NFT, and it took on new relevance in 2021 with the start of the NFT boom.

Meyohas will also be a speaker at Art Basel for the “The New Patrons: NFT Collectors and Supporters” conversation on June 16.

COUNTY

Booth B43

With works by Sarah Meyohas

While most booths at this year’s Untitled Art Miami Beach feature a selection of works by multiple artists, COUNTY has opted for a solo presentation of renowned conceptual artist Sarah Meyohas. Back in 2015, the French American artist made headlines with her cryptocurrency performance “Bitchcoin,” which was minted months before Etherium came into existence. In 2017, she was included in Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30” list. At COUNTY’s booth, Meyohas’s works continue the artist’s reflections on the nature and the possibilities of emerging technologies in contemporary society.

In addition to mesmerizing new hologram pieces by the artist, most of the works featured in the presentation are part of Mehoya’s enthralling “Speculation” series, including Liquid Speculation 5 and Blue and White Speculation (both 2021). “Even though she’s at the forefront in new mediums, her ‘Speculation’ works are created using a very traditional method: a hidden camera and two-way mirrors,” explained gallerist Dalton Freed. Close to half of the available works, priced between $20,000 and $30,000, had sold by the end of the day.

“Coming out of the pandemic when outdoor experiences and nature have taken on a new meaning and gravity in our lives, this exhibition represents a fresh way for people to engage with art and nature simultaneously,” the curator Tal Michael Haring, who worked on the show with Hadas Maor, said in a statement.

El Anatsui, Pamela Rosenkranz, Timur Si-Qin, Sigalit Landau and Sarah Meyohas are among the other artists who will contribute to the coming show at locations in the United States, Britain, South Africa, Australia, Israel and Canada.

By Bourree Lam

May 22, 2021 5:30 am ET

Sarah Meyohas’s work at the intersection of art, technology and finance earned the contemporary artist fame with financiers and tech geeks. Her latest piece aims squarely at the crypto crowd.

Long before Beeple’s digital collage fetched tens of millions of dollars at auction, Ms. Meyohas was experimenting with using the blockchain technology behind bitcoin to make art. The result looked a lot like the so-called nonfungible tokens that have powered millions in art sales in recent months, along with NBA Top Shot and other digital collectibles. NFTs are similar to bitcoin: Each one is unique, allowing them to act like deeds proving ownership of digital assets.

New York-based artist Sarah Meyohas invites us into an intriguing world of infinite tunnels in her installation series titled Speculations. Her thrilling body of work involves two mirrors facing each other, the empty space between them filled with a smattering of objects — rose petals, tree branches, a row of daisies, and even something as ephemeral as smoke — which produces intricate visuals that seemingly duplicate, recede and disappear into a void.

Sarah Meyohas is a visual artist working across media. For her project Cloud of Petals, she staged a performance at the site of the former Bell Labs. Sixteen workers photographed 100,000 individual rose petals, compiling a massive dataset. This information was used to map out an artificial intelligence algorithm that learned to generate new, unique petals forever.

The performance resulted in a film, six gaze-based virtual reality experiences, and a series of sculptures, presented during a large-scale solo exhibition at Red Bull Arts New York. The Cloud of Petals exhibition becomes a site for contemplation about a post-human reality and the future of labor in the face of automation. The film has been screened at various festivals, including the Minneapolis St Paul International Film Festival, Slamdance, NY Times Talks, CogX, and the Locarno Film Festival.

Don’t be fooled by the title of Sarah Meyohas’s current exhibition, “Cloud of Petals,” which seems to suggest a stereotypically girly flower display. On the contrary, the artist approaches roses from a no-nonsense, analytical perspective, informed by her clear-eyed take on the commercial aspect of the floral business—a far cry from the romance and femininity typically associated with such fragrant blooms.

“Yes, roses are a super symbol of love and beauty, but they are also a big business product,” Meyohas told artnet News during a visit to Red Bull Arts New York, where she was hard at work installing the show, which opened to the public October 12.

The exhibition is the outgrowth of a project that began last year at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, once a site of major scientific and technological innovation as the headquarters of the telephone and information giant. When Meyohas first set foot inside the historic, Eero Saarinen-designed space—then empty ahead of its conversion into Bell Works, a new multi-purpose development—the 26-year-old artist had no idea what she was getting herself into.

Cloud of Petals, the 26-year-old artist’s latest project, is as ethereal and delightfully obscure as it sounds. Meyohas marries nature and technology to discover the meaning in collecting (and collected) data; it’s fitting that the undertaking was conducted at Bell Labs, a now-abandoned research complex that birthed the information theory, which used math to define and represent information, allowing for its transmission, storage—and resulting, eventually, in the creation of the Internet. Opening at Red Bull Arts New York on October 12, Meyohas’s show is fourfold: it features a film, vitrines made by wall panels from Bell Labs fitted with two-way mirrors, six virtual reality simulations depicting digitized and pixelated rose petals, and two wall displays of 3,200 individually pressed and preserved petals.

Sarah Meyohas, an artist we interviewed back in January, has had her New York Stock Exchange account closed by Charles Schwab. She has exhibited her paintings which reflect her stock market trades and their effects on the market at Gallery 303. In an article by Fortune, it is said that her ambitions with this project is to “alter prices of 12 different NYSE-traded stocks,” proving her exhibition a relative success. With a market cap of $40 million or less, the effects of Meyohas’ stock buys are strong enough to be evident enough to catch the attention of Charles Schwab.

Sarah Meyohas had her account closed by Charles Schwab, perhaps making the exact point she wanted to

We think we know what stock performance means. Then Sarah Meyohas comes along.

Meyohas, a Wharton graduate who also holds an MFA from Yale, took that term as the title of her first solo art show, at the 303 gallery in New York City. For two weeks in January, Meyohas traded stocks on the New York Stock Exchange. Then, in real time, she drew the changes in each stock’s valuation with oil stick on blank canvases mounted throughout the space.

Artist Sarah Meyohas is a market mover—literally.

In her first solo show, “Stock Performance,” which opened Jan. 8 at New York City’s 303 Gallery, Meyohas will attempt to turn the ups and downs of the stock market into art. Starting Tuesday and continuing until Jan. 20, she will try to alter the prices of 12 different NYSE-traded stocks, painting those price movements on canvas as she trades—live—at the gallery.

Around this time last year, the art press picked up a quirky new story: a Yale photography M.F.A. named Sarah Meyohas had created her own cryptocurrency called Bitchcoin, with an exchange rate set at one Bitchcoin to 25 square inches of a Meyohas print. (As the value of her work changes over time, so too will the value of the coins.) In an art world that was grappling, often dismissively, with the shift toward art-as-investment, Meyohas’s take on the Bitcoin addressed the world of finance with unusual directness and a cooperative stance. It seemed to offer collectors a tool for using Meyohas's artworks as investments. 

Artist Sarah Meyohas launched her own personal cryptocurrency on Sunday night in the Financial District at Trinity Place, a bar located across from the birthplace of the Occupy movement, Zuccotti Park. Called BitchCoin, perhaps a feminist play on the name of the most famous cryptocurrency of them all, the currency is the subject of an exhibition on prediction at Where, a think tank and exhibition space based out of a shipping container in Brooklyn.