Short Answer Sunday: Sara Tuttle

Meant to elicit quick, intuitive responses, Short Answer Sunday will introduce readers to a wide variety of artists, educators, writers, curators, arts professionals, art enthusiasts and art adjacent individuals whose inclinations I admire. With the intent of getting to know the person behind the artwork as well generating new avenues to artistic discovery, participants may respond with only a few words or an artist’s name, always with the opportunity to elaborate if they wish!

Sara Tuttle is an accomplished artist, the Founder/Director of Foyer Gallery, and a really terrific person to talk to about art. As the connotations of the name suggest, Foyer is welcoming and also cool (not an easy act for a contemporary art gallery, but probably an ideal that more should emulate imho). Sara has a keen eye for contemporary painting and Foyer provides Richmond with a much-needed exhibition space that consistently highlights exceptional local and regional artists, all while making an effort to make art accessible to new viewers and collectors.

Sara’s own oeuvre of tactile paintings reflect and respond to the rhythms of domestic life. These paintings are abstractions, sure, but in the way that Miriam Schapiro’s femmages are abstractions, both thing and image, and a reinterpretation of items that are collected, recycled and made new. They give me flashbacks (sentimental and urgent) of the red-eyed, frenetic days (and nights) of early parenthood, evoked in equal measure by the paintings’ bright, rhythmic patterns and their title-induced associations (for better or worse, the intro song to Dinosaur Train will forever echo through my brain at unexpected intervals).

I know you’ll enjoy Sara Tuttle’s Short Answer Sunday interview—her responses are dynamite (for the record we also stan jangly, depressive dad rock & Adrianne Lenker in the SAS house)!

Find out more about Sara Tuttle on her website, at Foyer and on Instagram.

xo, Lauren

Name: Sara Tuttle
Occupation: Artist and Founder/Director of Foyer Gallery
Astrological data: I'm astrologically illiterate!
Hometown: Connecticut
Current location: Richmond, VA

Other than Instagram, how do you find new-to-you artists?

Word of mouth/other artists and exhibitions. 

 

An artwork that makes you laugh?

There are a good number of European royal portraits that make me giggle. 

 

An artwork that makes you cry?

Alice Neel’s portraits of mothers and their children – they’re so real and raw and it makes me remember just how fleeting my kids’ young childhood is!

 

Alice Neel, Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia), 1982
Lithograph in colors on Arches paper
33.5 x 30.625 in.
Image source

An artwork that you'd like to live inside for a week?

Any Andrew Wyeth landscape painting – take me to Maine, please. 

 

An artist whose work you can't stop thinking about?

Usually whichever artist is currently exhibiting in my gallery. It is a very cool experience as an artist myself to get to spend every week for a few months immersed in an exhibition of another artist’s work. My favorite piece in the show always changes by the end of the show and that’s also a fun journey. 

 

What's your favorite characteristic in an artwork?

An element of surprise/a sense of the process - the feeling that the final image may have even surprised the artist!

 

What's an artwork that you suspect that you shouldn't like, but you do (guilty pleasure)?

People denounce Richard Prince’s series where he prints his screenshots of (usually women’s) instagram selfies after writing the most recent comment as anti-feminist etc. (I think there may have even been copyright lawsuits?) But I think that the series brings up the public domain nature of social media and the blurring of the concept of ‘authorship’ that comes with the internet. The ultimate troll ‘art’? Totally. But I find it to be a striking social commentary about how once you put a picture out there you can’t control how it might be used. A famous artist could make money off of it! It raises questions that are even more pertinent today with AI constantly scraping images off of the internet.

 

What's an artwork that you secretly hate?

I’m going to respectfully keep these (strong) opinions to myself ;) 

 

Most insane art piece?

Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights is up there – I cannot believe that was painted in the late 15th/early 16th century. 

 

Fav monograph or art book?

Anything Amy Sillman.

 

Fav museum or gallery in your current city?

VMFA for museum. For galleries (other than Foyer ;)) I’d have to say that Main Projects has been putting on consistently impressive exhibitions!

 

Last exhibition you saw irl?

A bunch of great shows at other galleries around Richmond - There’s always a good show somewhere in our town!

 

An artwork that packs a spiritual punch?

Fra Angelico’s frescoes or DeKooning’s landscapes

 

Fra Angelico, The Mocking of Christ, 1440 - 1441, fresco
Basilica di San Marco, Florence, Italy
Image Source

An artwork that you'd like to see before you die?

The Ghent altarpiece.

 

What art material do you love to nerd out on?

The art store “Supply”, a few blocks down from Foyer, sells transparent spray paint. I want to play with it more I love working in mixed-media layers.

 

What was the last thing that you listened to in the studio?

Always music and it depends on what my current obsession is. I will listen to an album over and over and over again until I wear it out and can’t listen to it again for a few years. Listening to something I’m familiar with helps me focus in the studio. Genre-wise I usually fall back on some kind of indie dude-rock or shoe-gazey band with a driving beat – I’m basic and a sucker for a jangly guitar. Or slightly depressive dad-rock/Americana with guitar solos that are self-indulgently long ;) 

 

What song, book, podcast or film do you think everyone should know about?

I think Big Thief/Adrianne Lenker is making some of the most beautiful and arresting music of the past decade.

❤

Sara Tuttle’s most recent body of work is inspired by motherhood and the domestic environment. She received a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Richmond in 2009 and an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2017. She completed the Summer Studio Program at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2009 and taught high school art at Church Hill Academy for three years. Tuttle has exhibited four solo exhibitions in Richmond, VA most recently “In The Thick of It” at Shockoe Artspace in the Fall of 2024. Group exhibitions include “Those Who Tend” at Warnes Contemporary in New York City and “Limbo” at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, OR. In June 2025, Sara founded Foyer Gallery in downtown Richmond, VA where she showcases exceptional work by both emerging and mid-career artists, most of whom are from the region.  

For more, find her on Instagram, at Foyer and her on her website.