Sandy Sanders
About the Artist
![]() Born in San Francisco. BFA, Art Center College of Design Los Angeles. MFA at Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles. Married and lived in Los Angeles for 15 years. Made a living as a graphic designer for 41 years, mostly in the Bay Area. My 11 years in a West Oakland artist live-work space included participation in Occupy Oakland, a formative experience i will never forget. The spirit of creating a collective egalitarian world full of joy and color is the wind at my back of making art.
I was exhibiting fairly regularly for 3 years after Otis but the original plan was to teach college classes and exhibit. A post Prop 13 California/Reagan recession world had different plans for me as budget cutting fever made finding a teaching job impossible. So I rolled my freelance graphics business into full time work as graphic designer. I never stopped making visual art projects in my free time. From 2000 - 2014, I spent nearly every free moment making political art, posters and graphic interventions in opposition to what I saw as a political destruction of modern society and a regression to 1% oligarchy. I could see no sense of making beauty without consciously working towards creating a just sustainable, egalitarian world for all. My post grad exhibition works were majorly installation art relating to the physical street as an art object of real abstraction, and a playground of social activity and |
interconnectedness. I use multi & mixed media, 2D & 3D, collage, photography, painting, drawing, found objects, refuse & reusable materials. Whatever media and materials seem appropriate for a particular project. I've been shooting urban landscape photographs, and in particular my street/road compositions, since the early '70s.
I love installation art where the viewing space, art of many different types, and media come together in subject and form to work together to create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. A faceted approach of seeing a subject, object and environment. I try to incorporate this same approach when making individual objects and exhibiting multiple artworks together. I like to make the gritty, the funky, the beautiful. I work with the subjects of: “depiction”, “reality”, “abstraction”, image vs. word, preconceived notions, context, and expectations. I love color, composition, painterliness and the tension between physical object vs. pictorial space. I like the visceral, the inquisitive, the mysterious. I love making art of all kinds! http://sandys.art/pdf/resume_current.pdf |
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