Hope Sandrow (born 1951) is an American conceptual artist who works in the mediums of photography, video, mixed media, installation, sculpture, new media, performance, and social practice.
Early life and education Sandrow was born in Philadelphia, PA and grew up in Southern (Camden and Cherry Hill) New Jersey, attending Beaver College, Drexel University and Philadelphia College of Art. Her family emigrated from Russia to Philadelphia at the end of the 19th century.
Sandrow joined the emerging environmental movement as a high school freshman with the encouragement of her maternal grandparents, Pearl and Morris Liebman who nominated Sandrow as the inaugural "Miss Cleaner Air Week" held in recognition of the Air Quality Control Act.
Sandrow's art practice often parallels her life experiences. This is the conceptual context that is explored in all her work including open air studio spacetime.
Early Influences Marcel Duchamp was an early major influence, stemming from Sandrow viewing his works at The Philadelphia Museum of Art from the time she was a young child. Duchamp's way of working with "what is", chance, readymades and his intrigue with the concept of depicting the fourth dimension in art.
Sandrow also found inspiration in the work of Earth Artists, Nancy Holt, Ana Mendieta, Robert Smithson and James Turrell; her friend and mentor Feminist Artist, Nancy Spero and her husband artist, Leon Golub, and East Village colleagues.
Career
Sandrow creates installations and works of art that integrate site, history, culture, and social practices.
Her photographic and installation work(s), Memories Spaces Time, Hope & Fear, and water life, the latter, shown at The Whitney Museum (Philip Morris) in 1998 references the body, skin, the earth, water—in essence, the environment and the way people respond to, and treat their bodies – consequently, the earth as the macrocosm. Sandrow created the medium of silver print fragments in Memories and Spaces: peeling the emulsion from the paper base reflecting and embodying the context of the works.
In the 1980s, Sandrow was associated with the East Village scene that included colleagues, Keiko Bonk, Jimmy DeSana, Mike Bidlo, Luis Frangella, Futura 2000, Judy Glantzman, Keith Haring, Peter Hujar, Gracie Mansion, Carlo McCormick, Nicolas Mouferrage, Walter Robinson, Sur Rodney Sur, David Wojnarowicz, Rhonda Zwillinger.
Some of the early series that Sandrow produced in the 1980s included, Men On The Streets, Back on the Streets, Hope & Fear, In Response(mounted) were shown at the Hirshhorn Museum, Gracie Mansion Gallery, Zero1 (Los Angeles) and included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art.
In 1990, she received a National Endowment for the Arts - Artist Fellowship Grant, for her public artwork, The Artist & Homeless Collaborative and later received the Skowhegan Governor's Award. In 2022, the works of art from that project were presented by The New York Historical, in its exhibition, Art for Change: The Artist and Homeless Collaborative, and included Sandrow's Men On The Streets.
Material Matters: Art at the Anchorage was a commission by Creative Time's director, Anne Pasternak in 1995. For this large-scale installation Sandrow invited the participation of artists: Terry Adkins; Jane Dickson; Robin Kahn; Susan Leopold; Christian Marclay; Matthew McCaslin; Sara Pasti & Artist; Neighbors; Glenn Seator, and John Yau.
Her series water life, was commissioned as a solo exhibition at The Whitney Museum, Philp Morris in 1998.
In 1998, curator, Andy Grundberg, commissioned Sandrow to travel and create artwork for the traveling exhibition In Response to Place. The result was her installation, time(space) opening on September 11, 2001, at The Corcoran Gallery of Art and traveling on for four years.
In 2006, while on a walk in the woods of Shinnecock Hills, she encountered a Padovana rooster, later named Shinnecock for the location where they met. He then followed her home. This chance encounter inspired her ongoing project open air studio space time, a homesite for experimentation engaged in the creative process.
That same year, 2006, Alanna Heiss, Director and Chief Curator of PS1, commissioned Sandrow to create the installation, Godt Tegn Open Air Studio Shinnecock Hills spacetime. The installation featured a selection of large-scale panoramas documenting the life and travels of Shinnecock, the young rooster who followed her home, as well as the land that Sandrow campaigned to preserve in Shinnecock Hills.
From 2006 onward, Sandrow was commissioned and presented her work at The Museum of Art and Design, NYC; The New York Historical, NYC; The Contemporary Museum Baltimore, MD; The Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; The Southampton Historical Museum, The US Embassy in Jakarta, and LongHouse Reserve among others.
She created and initiated a performative collaborative work, On The Road from 2007 - 2010 with several artists including, Sur Rodney Sur and Fluxus artist, Geoffrey Hendricks. In 2023 and 2024, she collaborated with Kelly and Jeremy Dennis and Brianna Hernandez at Ma's House on The Shinnecock Tribal Nation land.
Sandrow's work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Corcoran Collection at the National Gallery of Art, The Parrish Art Museum, The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, The New York Historical, and other public and private collections including Eli Broad Foundation, Agnes Gund, Dakis Joannou, Vera List, Geoffrey Hendricks, Sur Rodney Sur, Henry Buhl Foundation, Jeffrey Deitch and Dorothy Lichtenstein.
Group exhibitions: 1980s
The Famous Show, curated by Gracie Mansion, Gracie Mansion Gallery NYC (1992) A Flag for the Eighties, curated by Nicolas Mouferrege, P.S.1, Long Island City, NY (1992) Spring Street Pier, curated by David Wojnarowicz and Mike Bidlo NYC (1983) Limbo, curated by Walter Robinson and Carlo McCormick, MOMA/PS1 (1984) New Galleries of the Lower East Side, curated by Helene Winer, Artists Space, NYC The New Portrait, curated by Jeffrey Deitch, P.S.1 Long Island City, NY (1984) New Galleries of the Lower East Side, curated by Helene Winer, Artists Space, NYC (1984) Climbing:The East Village, curated by Carlo McCormick, Hal Bromm Gallery (1984) Neo York curated by Phyllis Plous and Mary Looker, University Art Museum, University of California at Santa Barbara California (1984) Directions Biennial Toward the Baroque, curated by Phyllis Rosenzweig, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC. Sandrow, Stella, Morris and Turrell (1986) The East Village curated by Richard Martin, Harold Koda, Laura Sindebrand, Fashion Institute of Technology, NYC.(1986) Biennial: Painting and Sculpture Today, Indianapolis Museum of Art (1986); Group UFO (photography) curated by Sur Rodney Sur, Gracie Mansion Gallery NYC (1987) Contemporary Diptychs: The New Shape of Content curated by Roni Feinstein, Whitney Museum of American Art at Equitable Center NYC and Fairfield, CT.(1987) Large As Life: Contemporary Photography curated by Kellie Jones, Henry Street Settlement, NYC; Jamaica Arts Center (1987) Arrangements for the Camera: A View of Contemporary Photography, Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland (1987) Photography on the Edge, curated by Curtis Carter, Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Mil, WI (1988) The Photography of Invention: American Pictures of the 1980s, curated by Joshua P. Smith, National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC. Travels to: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Walker Arts Center, Minnesota (1989); Sequence (Con)Sequence: Photographic Multiples of the Eighties, curated by Julia Ballerini Blum Art Institute, Bard College, New York (1989) East Village USA, curated by Dan Cameron, New Museum (2005)
Social Practices Amid a culture of war, sexism, racism, and anti-semitism, Sandrow's art practice developed to reference life experiences - including recurrent sexism, harassment and abuse within art historical references such as her work, In Response(mounted), in reference to Marcel Duchamp's work Etant Donnés. Subsequently, she became a member of Visual Aids, Coalition for Freedom of Expression, Women's Action Coalition (WAC). She founded her own public art project The Artist & Homeless Collaborative a collaboration between artists, arts professionals colleagues and women and children who had lost their homes and living in New York City shelters. More recently, since 2003, she has been engaged in land preservation with the Shinnecock Nation in “(RE)collecting An American Dream” and “Sketches of Local History." Sandrow has shared her hens' eggs with members of The Retreat (2010-2016) and since the pandemic distributed over 13,000 eggs to the Shinnecock Food Pantry a consideration of Sandrow's project Nourishing Reciprocity. In 2017, she founded and now chairs the Town of Southampton Arts and Culture Committee.
Major works
Men on The Streets (1978–1984) Sandrow's first photographic series, is a series of street performances realized as photographic stills—the silver prints were handprinted by the artist. In 2019, the work was included Nicolas Mouferrage's solo exhibition at The Queens Museum. Sandrow's series explores gender discrimination by employing role reversal by returning the gaze towards men. As a response to The Equal Rights Amendment passed by Congress on March 22, 1972, Sandrow photographed primarily near Wall Street, the World Trade Center and in downtown Los Angeles investigating the parameters of "the personal" in relationship to the universal. Employing role reversal, i.e., challenging the notion of a woman walking alone on city streets, playing the "bad" girl, Sandrow propositioned male strangers to pose for portraits (not sex), for them to be looked at rather than being the looker. The body of work was first exhibited in the group show Six Young Photographers at the Soho Aldrich Center for the Visual Artists, NYC.
Back on The Streets (1982–1985) Back on the Streets a series of photographic portraits that references inside/outside, physically and metaphorically. The portraits were of East Village and Los Angeles artist friends posed outdoors amidst the moneyed corridors of Wall Street and LA Business District (1982–85). Selections of this work were included in New Museum Senior Curator, Dan Cameron's exhibition, East Village USA (2005) and first exhibited at Gracie Mansion Gallery.
Museum Studies: Hope & Fear (1986) Hope & Fear is a black and white photographic series shown at the Hirshhorn Museum in the exhibition, Toward the Baroque, as part of the Hirshhorn Biennial: Directions 1986 with artists, Frank Stella, James Turrell, Robert Morris and Hope Sandrow.
In response (mounted) (1989–1991) Marcel Duchamp's Étant Donnés is the art historical and personal reference for this series. Duchamp's seminal work was installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1969. The naked woman pictured in Duchamp's surreal tableau assumed personal context months later in Sandrow's own life, when behind a closed door Sandrow was similarly poised but on the examining table of an assailant. In 1970, from that same Museum's windows, Sandrow enjoyed views of the inaugural Earth Week celebration and attended events in Fairmount Park. As a high school freshman, Sandrow joined the emerging environmental movement in which her maternal grandmother and father involved her.
Sandrow's mounted response, was exhibited in a solo show at Gracie Mansion Gallery in 1989 and Grey Art Gallery in 1991. The work addressed the enshrouded secrecy of violence against women.
Water Life (1998)