Sara Schnadt Explores the Known Universe—and Beyond

By Catherine Eves

School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) alum Sara Schnadt’s (MFA 1998) illustrious career as an artist and aerospace ground systems architect has taken her from the very outer reaches of our solar system to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and beyond.

Schnadt describes her early work as autobiographical. Her earliest installations examined how the body, mundane rituals, and everyday objects can serve as sites for profound emotional and conceptual exploration. Consider Schnadt’s Undoing, where she dissects 98 red sweaters in response to her father’s terminal illness. The work is deeply personal, merging the mundane and the horrific in a ritualistic performance.

Schnadt nods to her time interning at a performance art magazine while earning her master’s at SAIC as the initial spark for her lifelong interest in how technology and fine art can intersect. At the magazine, she was tasked with managing their distribution system. She found the task of working with and ultimately redesigning the magazine’s distribution database far from tedious, and it cemented a guiding theme in her professional and artistic life: the relationship between technology and the human experience.

Building off this project, Schnadt began to focus on how digital technologies alter the ways we communicate, organize, and understand the world in her art practice. Her Connectivity series, for example, maps the collective experience in the digital age, where information is not only consumed but co-created and shared. The handmade nature of her installations contrasts with the high-tech nature of the subject matter, emphasizing both the human agency behind digital innovation and the limits of technology.

Schnadt describes her early work as autobiographical, but this project shifted to examine the culture at large. “I was just interested in making work that was not so autobiographical [but] about large sea-change trends in culture,” she said. “[And how] technological innovation was being leveraged in contemporary art practices.”

Her first job post-graduation was as a database designer at SAIC Career Services (now CAPX), where she developed the department’s first-ever digital database from scratch. “It was very complementary to my art practice, because I was learning the arts community in Chicago for my work, and [using] that same network to explore and leverage opportunities for exhibiting my work,” she said. “It was really beneficial for my own art practice and also for helping me understand, by creating professional resources for artists, how I wanted to set up my own art career, and [how to] have a balance between my day job and my own practice.”

“A particular quality of being an artist is that our resilience for approaching the unknown is very, very high.”

After graduation, when she moved to Los Angeles to explore a career in tech, she continued to participate in group and solo shows. Her career in tech really took off with a position at the aerospace startup Planet Labs in San Francisco. The work was exciting creatively and technically.

But an exciting position called her back to LA: System architect with the design group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a research and development center known for sending rovers to Mars and probes to the edges of the known universe. She channeled her creative energy into the role, in which she designed problems—and then helped solve them—for the ground systems of flagship missions pushing the boundaries of space exploration.

This technical skillbuilding revived her energy for her own arts practice. “For a while, I thought I was just translating all of [my creativity] into this new skill set of system architecture, but then it just kind of kept bubbling up back on its own,” she said, noting her participation in a show made up of artists who were also women in tech and aerospace. Her collection, Mission System Drawings, is a dynamic fusion of creativity, technology, and systems thinking. By documenting the design processes for NASA’s Europa Clipper and Mars 2020 missions, Schnadt merged the technical and artistic realms, capturing pivotal moments of transformation by blending intricate system designs with personal reflections on identity, spatial perception, and collective collaboration.

Working in the overlap of tech and creativity for Mission System Drawings was invigorating. Not long after that, rounding on her 11th year in LA, Schnadt knew it was time for a change. For years, the smog and pollution of the city had an adverse affect on her health. “I just realized that I was done being chronically ill for my job,” she said. So she relocated to the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado, responding to the pull of fresh mountain air and Boulder’s vibrant aerospace community. The escape from LA quickly resolved her health issues, which allowed her to renew focus on her studio practice while continuing to work in tech.

Just recently, Schnadt bought a house in the Boulder area, which includes a 1,000 square-foot heated garage that she is transforming into a “dream studio” space. The physical space seems to be a reflection of her life’s trajectory: expansive, adaptable, and carefully balanced between functional and inspirational.

Most importantly, Schnadt has found a way to live and work in a space that nurtures both her artistic and technological interests—a hybrid career she’s uniquely crafted for herself that continues to evolve as she creates and innovates in both fields.

“A particular quality of being an artist is that our resilience for approaching the unknown is very, very high,” Schnadt said. “And to just keep going when there’s ambiguity and to find a solution is something, I think, that is artists’ particular strength.” ■