About SAM
Sam Price is a New York City–based multimedia artist. Exploring the creative power of darkness, he investigates the suggestive nature of the unknown through his process and themes.
He is currently pursuing an MFA in Industrial Design at Parsons School of Design and earned a BFA with an Architecture minor from Cornell University in 2021. His work has been featured in VICE, Cornell’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Boston City Hall, the Kennedy Space Center, and 1stDibs’ inaugural digital art exhibition. Selected awards include Cornell’s Anderson Ranch Painting Scholarship, a \art grant, and the Edith Adams & Walter King Stone Award. In February 2024, he was curated into the first digital art collection archived on the Moon.
Price has collaborated with Ponce Neuroscience Lab at Harvard University on multiple projects. Most recently, he was shortlisted by the Philadelphia Museum of Art for its annual Collab Student Design Competition, and will be featured at ICFF 2026.
Darkness and the unknown are catalysts for projection, interpretation, and belief. We are predisposed to seek meaning, even when there is nothing to reference. I’m drawn to pareidolia (our instinct to find patterns in noise) and to the moment when an image feels like it is emerging rather than fully declared.
This threshold is embodied in eigengrau (“intrinsic gray”), the dark, shifting field we see through closed eyes. It precedes dreams and many great ideas: a universal experience in which perception articulates structure from noise. My earliest painting process mirrored this phenomenon: starting with a black ground, adding color, and expanding on patterns until they stabilize into deeper meaning. This approach is less about depiction and more about discovery.
I’ve not only embraced emergence from darkness as a creative method, but as a broader cultural and technological lenses. I explore throughlines about how people react when information is missing: the uncanny valley effect, the social externalities that arise around uncertainty, and black boxes increasingly shaping life while resisting comprehension.
With my sculptural projection work, I extend this into space. I’m interested in the godlike creative impulse to evolve physical worlds from our minds, conceiving dynamic architectures that reverse the historical shaping of psychology by environment. At the nexus of art and technology, new tools offer truer translations of metaphysical ideas into material reality. But I’m more interested in what resists fidelity: the glitches, mistakes, and hallucinations that appear as our visions near “ground truth,” and the real-world externalities that follow.
Across painting, sculpture, and digital media, I stage the tension between clarity and distortion, inviting viewers to notice their urge to complete the picture. I aim to externalize the mind’s quiet labor of turning the unknown into form, so viewers can recognize it in themselves.
PRESS HIGHLIGHTS:
WHDH 7 News Boston: "Out Of This World Artwork" (2/23/24)
Are Poets the New Painters? (4/20/22)
What Inspires My Sculptural Projections? (9/14/22)
An Interview with Perime Gallery (2/01/2021)