Sandow birk biography

Sandow Birk is a Los Angeles-based artist who, after graduating from the Otis Art Institute in 1988, and influenced by experiences at international residencies, has engaged with complex social and historical issues through the visual lens of political cartoonists like Thomas Nast, Honore Daumier, William Hogarth, and R.

Crumb; and historical painters and printmakers, like George Bellows, Emanuel Leutze, Eugene Delacroix, and Albrecht Durer. Birk’s work engages with historical truth-telling largely conveyed through, drawing, painting, and printmaking, and with subjects as diverse as urban life, the Qur’an, great works of literature, historical texts, surfing, and the prison-industrial complex. 

Birk has received prestigious awards and honors, including an Honorary Fellowship in the Dante Society of America; a Fulbright Fellowship for painting to Rio de Janeiro; a Getty Fellowship; a Guggenheim Fellowship; a National Endowment for the Arts Grant to Mexico City;