Sandy Skoglund (born September 11, 1946) is an American photographer and installation artist. Her contributions to photography have advanced the medium as a form of conceptual art. She is well known for her intricately designed environments, which utilize painterly and sculptural techniques within staged and performative scenes. Her contributions to photography have advanced the medium as a form of conceptual art, and she is considered to be one of the most influential artists working in staged photography. Skoglund's art has been the subject of numerous one person exhibitions and retrospectives, and is in the collections of major museums and arts institutions.
Early life, education, and teaching Skoglund was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts on September 11, 1946. At the age of 3, Skoglund and her younger brother were hospitalized and quarantined with polio on a ship anchored in Boston Bay.
She spent her childhood all over the United States including Massachuesetts, Maine, Connecticut, and California. Her summers were spent working various jobs, including the Space Bar in Disneyland's Tomorrowland and later decorating cakes on a Detroit bakery assembly line.
She studied both art history and studio art at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, graduating in 1968. In 1967, she studied art history through her college's study abroad program at the Sorbonne and École du Louvre in Paris, France Studying art history at the Sorbonne ignited her interest in avant-garde cinema, especially Cahiers du Cinema and the French New Wave’s auteur theory.
After graduating from Smith, Skoglund taught middle-school art in Batavia, Illinois for a year before attending graduate school at the University of Iowa, where she studied painting, art conservation, filmmaking, multimedia art, and printmaking. In 1971, she earned her Master of Arts and in 1972 a Master of Fine Arts in painting from Iowa. Skoglund was an art professor at the University of Hartford between 1973 and 1976.
Skoglund held a faculty position at the Department of Arts, Culture and Media of Rutgers University–Newark in Newark, New Jersey. She retired from Rutgers in 2025.
Conceptual art practice In 1972, Skoglund began working as a conceptual artist in New York City. She taught herself photography in order to document her artistic endeavors, and experiment with the theme of repetition. She also became interested in advertising and high technology—trying to re-frame mass media aesthetics for a noncommercial purpose via combining the technical focus found in the commercial world and bringing that into the fine art studio. In an interview with curator Luca Panaro, she imparts that, "Mixing of the natural and the artificial is what I do everyday of my life, and I hope that I am not alone in this process." Skoglund's work at that time involved repetitive and accumulative gestures derived from a minimalist philosophy resulting in works that "made themselves" over time. Learning more about film techniques prompted her interest in advertising images and popular culture, which yielded Skoglund’s 1978 still life series of food. These images had titles like Peas on a Plate and Luncheon Meat on a Counter, which she described as "commercially uncommercial".
Artistic style, and themes Photography critic Andy Grundberg notes that Skoglund's work contains "all the hallmarks of the new attitude toward photographs: they embrace blatant artificiality; they allude to and draw from an 'image world' of endless preexisting photographs, and they reduce the world to the status of a film set."
Germano Celant, venerated art historian, observes: "The atmosphere that holds sway in Skoglund's installations is steeped in a sense of disorientation, of loss of the center and crisis of rationality.
Skoglund often creates meticulous and playful compositions by building elaborate sets or tableaux, and embellishing them with carefully selected hand-painted furniture, hand altered commercial and quotidian objects, as well as live models. She then photographs the set. These works are characterized by a formidable amount of one particular object, painterly mark-making, and either bright contrasting colors or a monochromatic color scheme.
Photo curator and historian Carol Squiers writes: "Skoglund sets up a series of tensions that the viewer must struggle to bridge. Most obviously, her work plays out the tension between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality, between photography and sculpture." Squiers further notes: "Throughout her work Skoglund sets up a series of disquieting oppositions, among them visuality versus content, celebration versus critique, whimsy versus horror, the banal versus the extraordiinary, the dream versus the nightmare."
Food and animals are common elements in Skoglund's work. She explains the significance and allure to both food and animal imagery, stating that: "I think of Food as a universal language. Everyone eats. For the camera, food has colors and textures that can be manipulated to fabulous effect. I love the childish behavior of sculpting and painting with food. Food as a material allows me to explore the boundaries between nature and artifice...In my works with animals, I like to ask: who is looking at whom? I am especially interested in exploring consciousness as seen from a non-human perspective. Animal life presents people with a relief from themselves."
Curator Marvin Heiferman describes the impact of Skoglund's juxtaposition of commercial aspects, dramatization, and conceptual art elements by noting that, "The work simmers down and reminds viewers of their smallness in a big, overdetermined world where consumer culture, nature, science, and their interior gyroscopes regularly spin out of control." Grundberg also notes the serious effect of Skoglund's exuberant art, which "evoke adult fears in a playful, childlike context".
Select notable artworks
Crumpled and Copied (1973) The utilization of repetitive, process-oriented techniques began early on in Skoglund's career. Her 1973 composition Crumpled and Copied was manifested by repeatedly crumpling and photocopying a piece of paper.
The Holes in a Saltine Cracker (1974) The Holes in a Saltine Cracker portrays how self-regulating repetition influences an object's aesthetic value. Photographing a single saltine cracker and then reproducing that image 77 times, resulted in a composition that became abstracted and obscured in accordance with the subtle mechanical shifts derived from the Xeroxing process.
Cubed Carrots and Kernels of Corn (1978) In 1978, Skoglund expanded on this theme by producing a series of repetitive food item still life images. These photographs of food were presented in geometric and brightly colored environments so that the food becomes an integral part to the overall patterning, as in Cubed Carrots and Kernels of Corn, with its checkerboard of carrots on a white-spotted red plate placed on a cloth in the same pattern.
Hangers (1979) Hangers features a composition of a man in yellow pajamas entering a dreamlike setting of rubber duckies, plastic chairs and blue plastic hangers arranged on a yellow wall. The staged photograph was created inside Skoglund's former tenement studio on Elizabeth Street in lower Manhattan. The work was initially displayed at the Castelli Gallery in the 1980s. In 2015, the Ryan Lee Gallery in New York City, presented a window installation of Hangers, which Skoglund recreated as a site-specific installation that was prominently on view for anyone walking along the High Line, which is adjacent to Gallery's window display. Every Saturday during the installation's run, a performer meandered around the space.
Radioactive Cats (1980) One of Skoglund's best known works, titled Radioactive Cats (1980), features life-size, bright green-painted clay cats running amok in a gray kitchen. An older man sits in a chair with his back facing the camera while his elderly wife looks into a refrigerator that is the same color as the walls. The cats were sculpted using chicken wire and plaster. The kitchen is furnished with used furniture Skoglund acquired, and the man and woman that Skoglund used as models were her neighbors at the time. The end product is a very evocative photograph. In a 2013 online forum by the Getty Center for Education in the Arts, Terry Barrett and Sydney Walker identified two viable interpretations of Radioactive Cats. The first is about social indifference to the elderly and the second is nuclear war and its aftermath, drawing comparison to the Chernobyl disaster, and the highly documented dogs that survived the nuclear explosion and fallout.
Revenge of the Goldfish (1981) Another well recognized composition of Skoglund's, is a fantastical arrangement featuring 119 handcrafted goldfish hovering above two people in bed late at night, called Revenge of the Goldfish (1981). The artwork was used as cover art for the Inspiral Carpets 1992 album, also titled Revenge of the Goldfish. Revenge of the Goldfish utilizes a variety of elements of art and design, including the juxtaposition of complementary colors, scale, and balance. All of these aspects contribute to the artworks' dramatic effect. The background consists of a monochromatic deep blue, which is reminiscent of both nighttime and the ocean. This blue is contrasted by bright orange goldfish floating through the room. Skoglund arranged the human models from a vantage point that makes their identities ambiguous to the viewer.
Maybe Babies (1983) Skoglund's installation and staged photograph Maybe Babies features larger than life babies sculpted in clay, then cast in polyester resin. The babies are strewn across a sci-fi inspired landscape made from piles of black aquarium sand and old TV antennas painted with black and green stripes. In the May 1983 issue of Artforum, critic Charles Hagen describes the work as having, “The basic elements of a classic horror film…the threatening monsters from the Id mindlessly swarming Out There, just beyond the lamp-lit security of a middle-class home.”
“True Fiction One” and “True Fiction Two”(1985) In 1985, Skoglund completed a series titled "True Fiction One". The process of creating the series incorporated the photomontage technique. Skoglund began by taking photographs of candid street and domestic scenes in black and white, later adding color to them in the darkroom. Then she cut and pasted pieces of the photographs into collaged compositions and rephotographed them using an 8 by 10 large format camera. In 2005, she revisited the series, this time utilizing digital tools like Photoshop to alter the images. The revamped series of compositions is called "True Fiction Two."
Sock Situation (1986) For a Christmas display at Barneys New York department store, Skoglund set up a whimsical and stylish scene within a monochromatic green painted kitchen strewn with red socks. Three mannequins in tuxedos stand unyielding. The mannequin in the middle is holding a vacuum cleaner. The items used in the installation were chosen from merchandise on sale in the store.
Fox Games (1989) Skoglund's Fox Games has a similar imaginative feel to Radioactive Cats. The composition envisions a restaurant scene where the tables, chairs, windows, chandelier, and food items are painted in grayscale. In the back corner of the dining room, two individuals are served by a waiter, while bright red foxes are depicted as being playfully in motion around the room.
The Cocktail Party (1992)