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Sara Kathryn Arledge (1911-1998) was a prolific and under recognized artist who emphasized the eerie in the mundane and the disorienting in the beautiful. Arledge worked at the margins of art history, shaping her practice with idiosyncratic personal myth. She is considered a pioneer of ciné-dance (dance made uniquely by and for the medium of film) and was one of the first to film dance movement to “extend the nature of painting to include time.” Arledge lived and worked primarily between Pasadena and Santa Cruz, California. Born in Mojave, California, she lived most of her life between Pasadena and Santa Cruz. Arledge’s personal life was shadowed by trauma. She lived with mental illness and was institutionalized against her will. Her relationship with her only child was complicated, and as a troubled young man he committed suicide.

Arledge received a Bachelor of Education in Art from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1963. She attended and taught at Columbia University in 1934 and at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia in 1934-1935, and taught in the Department of Art at the University of Oklahoma from 1943-1944 and at the University of Arizona, Tucson from 1945-1946.