Associate Professor of Visual Arts
Biography
Sara Fletcher is an artist who works in oil and gouache paint, clay, and printmaking. In 2019, she had a one-person show in New York City at Prince Street Gallery entitled Preparations. This was a preparation for something better, as the following year, she and her daughter were baptized at St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Concordia, Missouri.
Since 2022, Fletcher has taught studio art at Concordia University-Irvine. Thanks to a generous gift from John and Linda Friend to Concordia's art department, she is thankful to have helped acquire, among other works, "Christ before Pilate," a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer, now displayed in Christ College. For the past two years, she has helped start and co-facilitated the summer Creative Arts Retreat at Concordia for high school students.
In 2023, she presented the talk, “One moving image: Rembrandt van Rijn’s Christ with the Sick around Him, Receiving Little Children (The Hundred Guilder Print),” at the Association for Core Texts and Courses Conference in Dallas, TX, as a conference presentation and panel discussion. In 2025, she presented "Seeing the Harmonies: Church Art as Visual Music" at an LWML Women's Retreat at Faith Lutheran Church in Dana Point, CA. She has an upcoming presentation, "How Form Affects Content: Analyzing the Internal Logic of Geometry in Biblical Visual Art," at the Lutheranism & the Classics conference hosted at the Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, IN.
In 2025, two of Fletcher's paintings were published in the anthology Messy Magnificat: An Anthology of Mothers Who Create (Rachel Yorkowitz, senior editor). In 2024, her work was included in Drawing from Perception, Invention, and Memory at the Robert & Elaine Stein Galleries, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, juried by Eve Mansdorf. In 2023, she completed a commissioned painting for the sanctuary of St. Paul Lutheran church in Chicago.
Her art and teaching explore how observations of nature and imagination affect each other. She aims to offer a compelling experience of God's beauty to one's neighbors. She is grateful that the Concordia Visual Arts Department provides vital art for homes, businesses, books, and churches.
Education
- MFA, Painting, The University of Iowa, 2006
- Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Painting, Brandeis University, 2003