2009 Book Fair Artist Sarajo Frieden

SARAJO FRIEDEN
2009/8th Annual West Hollywood Book Fair Artist

The West Hollywood Book Fair is pleased to announce Sarajo Frieden as our 8th Annual West Hollywood Book Fair artist! Each year, a different artist creates an original painting for the Book Fair’s “Fall Into Reading” theme. The artwork appears on all of the West Hollywood Book Fair materials (available starting in June). We are thrilled to feature Sarajo, who is an extraordinary and well-known Los Angeles area artist.

Sarajo works from a studio in Los Angeles that borders Thai Town, Little Armenia and Koreatown, with Guatemalan and Salvadoran bakeries nearby. The cacophony of hand-painted signs in a variety of languages serves as both inspiration and daily reminders that the ordinary is often extraordinary and nothing is what it seems. A host of disparate vocabularies from the worlds of fine, folk and decorative art, including Persian miniatures, Shaker trance drawings, Japanese ukiyo-e, and her Hungarian great aunt’s embroidery, can be found wandering through her images. Using open ended narratives, folk tales, abstraction and the juxtaposition of discordant images, Sarajo tries to give form to the human experience as she sees it.

Sarajo’s work has been exhibited in galleries in Los Angeles, San Diego, North Carolina, Minnesota, New York, Rome, Venice, Naples and Australia. Her many clients include Harper Collins, National Geographic, Time, Chronicle Books, New Yorker, Scholastic and Graphique de France.

Web Site: http://www.sarajofrieden.com