The exhibition Sarah Oppenheimer showcases a new site-specific installation by the artist that addresses the unique architectural space of the Mills College Art Museum. Oppenheimer's work reveals architecture as a source of social construction, particularly in museums, where architecture frames and guides how visitors see and interact with the people and objects that inhabit the space. The Mills College Art Museum is a historic beaux-arts structure designed by Bay Area−architect Walter Ratcliff in 1925. The museum's gallery, situated in a cast-concrete building, has a large, open floor plan with an extensive ceiling skylight. Oppenheimer's work utilizes the specific qualities of the Museum's scale, light, and decoration to explore the ways in which individuals navigate constructed space.

Sarah Oppenheimer received a BA in Semiotics from Brown University in 1995 and a MFA in painting from Yale University in 1999, where she is currently a critic in the School of Art. Her work has been exhibited in Europe and in the United States at venues including the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; the Queens Museum of Art, New York; the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the Drawing Center, New York; and Skulpturens Hus, Stockholm, Sweden. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2010−11 Gilmore D. Clarke/Michael Rapuano Rome Prize, the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowships in Architecture/Environmental Structures (2010, 2006), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship (2009), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art (2007), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2007). Sarah Oppenheimer was born in Austin, Texas; she lives in New York.

Founded in 1925, the Mills College Art Museum is a forum for exploring art and ideas and a laboratory for contemporary art practices. Through innovative exhibitions, programs, and collections, the Museum engages and inspires the intellectual and creative life of the Mills community, as well as the diverse audiences of the Bay Area and beyond.