Sam van Strien

Big news! I’m thrilled to share that I’ve joined Indiana University as an Assistant Professor of Architecture. I’m excited to be a part of the J. Irwin Miller Architecture Program, where I’ll help shape a MArch program at the intersection of art and architecture in Columbus, Indiana - a city with an incredible legacy of modern and contemporary design. This opportunity is a dream come true, aligning with so many of my interests, and I’m happy to work alongside such great colleagues and students. I’m forever grateful to the friends, family, and mentors whose generosity, guidance, and belief in me over the years have helped me get to this point in my career. Even though I’m now based in Bloomington, Indiana, this isn’t a final goodbye to North Carolina - a beautiful place I’ve been lucky to call home for the past two years, and where I found an incredibly supportive and welcoming arts community. I’ll continue to visit often and stay connected through projects in the area, including a solo exhibition this summer at @artspacenc in Raleigh. NC folks - let me know if you’d like to collaborate on a show or project! Photos of Columbus architecture by photographers Iwan Baan and Balthazar Korab.

Thank you to @ual_alumni for featuring me in their Alumni Stories series. Forever grateful for my time at Central Saint Martins and the lasting impact it’s had on my work. Full interview via the link in my bio.

I’m very happy to have a text I wrote a while back published by @drawing.matter , an organisation that so closely aligns with my interests. In the text I reflect on my practice and process, and the relationship between rubbings and architecture. Check it out in full on the @drawing.matter website!

My work is currently part of ArtFields, the largest arts festival in the Southeast, held annually in Lake City, South Carolina. Grateful to the panel for selecting my work - Mitchell Burleson, the 2025 Grand Prize winner; Ben Davis, author and art critic for ArtNet news; Lauren Schell Dickens, chief curator at the San José Museum of Art; Christopher Ho, artist and curator; and Anne Collins Smith, chief curator of the New Orleans Museum of Art.  If you’re in the area, the 2026 ArtFields Festival takes place from April 10th - May 2nd, 2026 in Lake City, SC.

At the start of my first semester as faculty @iubloomington , I had the opportunity to be part of a group exhibition at @411gallery in Columbus, Indiana, alongside @laa_office . A number of MArch students in our program - including Alireza Alikaei, Anita Baume, Nathan Cesarski, Christopher Elam, and Abdullah Jaber - also presented their work from Silvia Acosta’s class. Thank you to @artsincolumbus for the invitation and letting me introduce my work to the community here. “Recent works by J. Irwin Miller Architecture Program faculty members explore printmaking as a tool for representing cultural memory (Daniel Luis Martinez) and interrogating the symbolism of modernist buildings (Sam van Strien). The exhibition also includes works from the school’s visual studies curriculum curated by Silvia Acosta. Across a range of materials and scales, students investigate the dialogue between immaterial concepts and physical constructs.”

Now through Friday, March 13, J. Irwin Miller faculty and students show their work at the 411 Gallery in Columbus. Faculty members Daniel Luis Martinez, Sam van Strien, and Silvia Acosta, as well as Acosta’s students, exhibit current work in the exhibition “Projective Impressions.” The gallery is open Thursdays and Fridays from noon to 6 p.m. Read more about the exhibition and the Eskenazi School's newest faculty member van Strien, from a link in our bio. Image: Daniel Luis Martinez, from “Echale Agua” or “Throw Water on It,” a series of cyanotype prints and mixed media drawings.

I’m grateful to have been part of 𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘶𝘶𝘮 at @grunwaldgallery , sharing my work alongside such talented and inspiring colleagues @iu_architecture and @iuartanddesign . “Work by over fifty Indiana University artists, architects, and designers comes together in “Continuum: Eskenazi Faculty Exhibition 2026” at the Grunwald Gallery of Art at the Indiana University Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design… the exhibition spans media across disciplines representing the scope of instruction at the school from fashion design to architecture, interior design, and diverse areas of studio art, including fibers, printmaking, ceramics, graphic design, sculpture, digital art, video, photography, painting, and jewelry design/metalsmithing.” 𝘐𝘮𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘊𝘢𝘱𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭, photo-engraved magnesium plates, 11 x 8 inches.

Looking back through the install documentation from 𝘌𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘔𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘴𝘮 - and feeling so grateful for how this show came together. Featuring the work of Amba Sayal-Bennett (@ambasayalbennett ), Daniel Rich (@drichski ), Frances Lightbound (@franbound ), and Sam van Strien (@samvanstrien ), the exhibition brought together painting, printmaking, and drawing to explore how we engage with, document, and reimagine modern architecture and the built environment - revealing both its utopian ambitions and the legacies it leaves behind. This show wouldn’t have happened without the incredible support of @birdlandraleigh , @vaeraleigh , @jeangraymohs , and @petesackart . A finally a huge thank you to Sally Van Gorder (@sallyvangorder ) for the fantastic exhibition documentation, and for capturing it all so beautifully.

I’m happy to share that my work is part of 𝘈𝘵 𝘏𝘢𝘯𝘥, 𝘈𝘵 𝘗𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘵: 𝘊𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘔𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘋𝘰 at @thetarble on the campus of Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois! Huge thanks to juror Nick Larsen (@nick.larsen ) - artist and managing editor at @radius.books - for curating my work in this exhibition. “At its core, collage is a way of pulling from what already exists to imagine something that doesn’t. It’s about making do with what’s at hand and using those limited resources to explore fantasy, fiction, speculative pasts and futures, hybridity, the impossible, and the not-yet-to-be.  This layering of material - which occurs across media, including but not limited to video, sculpture, textiles and quilting, painting, and photography - opens up new possibilities for the ideas, objects, and images around us. Collage is about context or, more specifically, re-context, as the meaning of that original content shifts through repurpose, recombination, and re-imagination.” Exhibition Opens: Nov. 14, 2025 with in person and virtual receptions Virtual Juror’s Talk: Nov. 15, 2025 at 2:00 pm CST (1:00 MST, 3:00 EST) via Zoom (recording below) Virtual and In-Person Exhibition at the Tarble Arts Center on View: Nov. 14, 2025 - Jan. 31, 2026

Drawings from 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘋𝘪𝘴𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵, on view at the Golden Belt Gallery in Durham until November 13. Made with white charcoal and laser-cut engraving, these works draw from the intricate Whig Rose coverlets found in Arrowmont School of Art & Crafts historic weaving collection.

Close-ups from 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘋𝘪𝘴𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵, on view at the Golden Belt Gallery in Durham. These rubbings and laser-cut engravings trace cabins from the Museum of Appalachia — structures uprooted by TVA dam flooding in East Tennessee during the 1930s. Reflecting on the Tennessee Valley Authority’s legacy of progress and loss, each work’s tactile surface becomes both memorial and confrontation, preserving traces of people and places submerged in the pursuit of modernization. The laser-etching process, which engraves into the charcoal rubbings, echoes the physical and cultural erasures embedded in the region’s history.

Artist Highlight: Birdland Gallery is excited to be exhibiting the work of Amba Sayal-Bennett (@ambasayalbennett ), a British-Indian artist based in London, as part of Echoes of Modernism, an exhibition curated by @samvanstrien . The exhibition is open by appointment until Sunday. Amba is an artist working across drawing, projection, and sculptural installation. Her practice explores how methods of abstraction are exclusionary and performative, crafting boundaries between what is present, manifestly absent, and othered. Her recent work focuses on the migration of modernist forms and their role within fascist and brutalist architecture. Using translation as method, she explores the movement of bodies, knowledge and form across different sites, processes inherent to the diasporic experience. Sayal-Bennett received her BFA from Oxford University, her MA in History of Art from The Courtauld, and her MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art. She was awarded her PhD in Art Practice and Learning from Goldsmiths and has published her practice-based research with Tate Papers. Between January and March 2022, she was The Derek Hill Foundation scholar at the British School at Rome in Italy. Recent exhibitions include Drawing Room Invites, Drawing Room, London, (2025); Artist’s Rooms, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (2024); Proposals for a Memorial to Partition, Twelve Gates, Philadelphia (2023); Geometries of Difference, Somerset House, London (2022); Horror in the Modernist Block, IKON, Birmingham (2022); and Tomorrow, White Cube, London (2021).