Sandow Birk: Así es mi Pueblo
Raised on the beaches of California and currently living and working in Los Angeles, Sandow Birk is a graduate of the Otis/Parsons Art Institute. His work emphasizes social issues; his frequent themes include inner city violence, graffiti, various political issues, travel, prisons, surfing, and skateboarding. He received an NEA International Travel Grant to Mexico City in 1995, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Rio de Janeiro for 1997. In 1999 he was awarded a Getty Fellowship for painting, followed by a City of Los Angeles (COLA) Fellowship in 2001. Sandow's epic, pseudo-historical series In Smog and Thunder—in which Los Angeles and San Francisco wage all out war for control of the Golden State—was shown at the Laguna Art Museum in 2000, and his "mockumentary" film of the same name has won numerous film festival awards. His series of idyllic landscape paintings of prisons was exhibited at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum in 2001 and in New York in 2002. Most recently, he completed an enormous project involving the rewriting and illustrating of the entire Divine Comedy into contemporary American English. The resulting exhibition Sandow Birk's Divine Comedy was shown at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2005 and traveled to several institutions. His feature film Dante’s Inferno, in collaboration with Paul Zaloom, Sean Meredith, and Elyse Pignolet, was featured at several 2006 film festivals.
artwork courtesy Sandow Birk and
Koplin Del Rio Gallery, Culver City
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