Highlights from Sandow Birk's presentation at the John Hope Franklin Center's weekly Wednesdays at the Center series.
This presentation will outline Birk’s various projects throughout his lifetime. Birk began by taking classical paintings and reinventing them in the context of California surf culture. He then started portraying scenes from Los Angeles in the 1990's, again, modeled after classical paintings.
Inspired by classical American landscape paintings, Birk spent the next few years painting all of the California state prisons.
During the height of the Iraq War, Birk produced woodblock prints and paintings that depict scenes from the conflict. This led him to begin a project of hand-transcribing the entire Qur’an according to historic Islamic traditions and illuminating the text with relevant scenes from American life. Nine years in the making, the project was inspired by a decade of extended travel in Islamic regions of the world.
Birk is currently working on transcribing important documents, such as the U.S. Constitution and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, as imaginary monuments.
Los Angeles artist Sandow Birk is a well-travelled graduate of the Otis/Parson’s Art Institute. Frequently developed as expansive, multi-media projects, his works dealt with contemporary life in its entirety. With an emphasis on social issues, frequent themes of his past work include inner city violence, graffiti, political issues, travel, war, prisons, as well as surfing and skateboarding. Birk was the recipient of a 1995 NEA International Travel Grant to Mexico City to study mural painting, a 1996 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 1997 Fulbright Fellowship to paint in Rio de Janeirio. In 1999, Birk was awarded a Getty Fellowship for painting and in 2001 he received a City of Los Angeles (COLA) Fellowship. In 2007, Birk was an artist in residence at the Smithsonian Institute and in 2009 he was in residence at the Cité Internatioale des Arts in Paris. Birk’s most recent project involves a consideration of the Qur’an as relevant to contemporary life in America.
