Sarah Newton is a San Francisco artist who works primarily on paper in a variety of media including drawing, etching, and woodblock printing. In her work, Newton often focuses on spaces and details of the everyday built environment that generally exist at the periphery of attention.

Newton’s recent drawings are an exploration of the proposed Bay Trail, a project begun in 1989, which follows the shoreline of the Bay Area. This planned 500-mile path currently exists in discontinuous pieces. Following the map of the trail, Newton draws its incomplete segments. She focuses on the endpoints where the trail hits the zones of construction, industry, and restricted areas which prevent the trail sections from being connected. 

Visiting the broken lines on the map takes Newton to places outside of public use, unimproved lands that still contain the remnants of the maritime and military past of the shoreline, areas of infrastructure and industry that are overlooked. The landscape is transitional, not only due to the Bay Area’s appetite for improvable land, but also as a result of gradual land subsidence and rising sea level. The fragile changing edge of the ocean is also the shifting margin where people will see the drastic effects of humanity’s hand on the environment.

Newton has been a featured artist for the San Francisco Center for the Book's Roadworks printmaking event; she was invited to create an artist's book “That's It: Liquor, Beer & Wine” published by the SFCB's Imprint Publications. In 2014 and 2016, Newton was awarded fellowship residencies at Playa Artists' Residency program in Oregon. She has a degree in printmaking from the California College of the Arts.

Newton’s drawings have been included in the publication “New American Paintings,” as well as in solo and group exhibitions in the Bay Area, London, and Yokohama, with recent solo and two person exhibitions at Cañada College in Redwood City, and Inclusions Gallery, San Francisco.