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BY ADRIENNE FRANK

The paintings of nineteenth-century slave quarters and churches by Sanabria, MFA ’74, hung earlier this year at the Athenaeum in Alexandria, Virginia.

Painter Sherry Zvares Sanabria looks at forgotten spaces and sees lives worth remembering.

Intrigued by places where people have experienced profound moments in their lives—even traumatic, ugly moments—Sanabria, CAS/MFA ’74, has made a career of capturing the magic and mystery of sagging beams and faded brick. Her latest work, a collection of 30 paintings of nineteenth-century slave quarters and churches, goes beyond chipped paint and weathered wood to honor the spirit of the African Americans who once inhabited those spaces.

“I want my work to convey a sense of the things that have gone on in the buildings, and the people who’ve lived there. You never see people in the paintings, but you always feel them,” explains Sanabria.

“My intention in painting images from the antebellum and Jim Crow periods in our history is to remember and honor those who lived, worked, and gathered together in these buildings,” she continues.

A native Washingtonian, Sanabria is often directed to sites by friends and patrons, whose referrals have taken her from New York’s Ellis Island to Oradour, France, a town destroyed by German soldiers in 1944 and, recently to slave quarters in Loudoun County, Virginia. When she arrived at the site, just a few miles from her Leesburg studio, Sanabria saw “a building that needed to be remembered.”

For the next five years, she traversed the East Coast, visiting slave cabins in Florida, North Carolina, and dozens of locations in between.

After taking photographs of the location, Sanabria would return to her studio to ponder the perfect picture. “I can make anything look like what it is. The right image goes beyond that. I want [the viewer] to be able to go into that room and feel . . . that space,” she explains.

These paintings, which took anywhere from one month to two years to complete, “opened up another world to me,” Sanabria says.

Sanabria’s painting, “Oradour Window,” is featured in the exhibition All in the Family: A Juried Show of American University Alumni, which runs through October 28 at the AU Museum at the Katzen.