About the Artist

Sandy Sanders (AKA Marshall Sanders) (b.1951). Sandy was born and raised in San Francisco, CA. BFA @ Art Center College of Design 1975. MFA @ Otis Art Institute 1979. He exhibited multi-media installation works consistently from 1979 thru 1983. He is a multi-disciplinary, multi media artist that made living as a graphic artist for 41+ years while producing largely non-commercial, conceptual visual art projects, in the fine art realm.

His fine art practice focuses on holistic art experiences that only art an installation environment can provide. His first installation series presented simulations of excavated pieces of street pavement as abstract compositional objects presented as art objects in a gallery environment. Some pieces on the floor, some leaning against the wall, later hanging on the wall. Included in these street installations were: fantasy hand-colored b&w documentary photograph-compositions; found objects from the street; mixed media & 3d assemblages & collections of visual objects documenting & tinkering with the perceptions of our urban streets as a play field of social activity, a vehicle of urban interconnectedness.

In the late 70's and early 80's, Sandy produced a number of artist's books. Small edition, handmade, book art forms that were able to merge visual and verbal art forms into unique experiences. These were shown at then existing artist's book stores in the Los Angeles and SF Bay Areas as well as at NYC's Franklin Furnace. A few are in the collections of Chicago Art Institute Library, Tweed Museum, Minnesota, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Library, Chicago.

In the 1980's, each day for a one year period, he acrylic painted one small 7" x 5" seascape canvas. He wanted to see the daily flow of personal emotion and feeling as was expressed through this daily painting discipline, then juxtapose the canvasses, in dated sequence, in gallery exhibit. One form of presentation was a straight line of touching canvasses wrapping around the gallery room walls, bringing a 365 day long, multi-colored horizon line, inside. Another presentation included Spring and Fall grids. Two large rectangular grids of 15 rows of 7 canvas-day weeks, flush mounted next to one another. A variety of other configurations were experimented with and documented.

In the 1990's, while experimenting with Photoshop as an early adopter of PC graphics systems, Sandy discovered possibilities with digital brush strokes, unfortunately limited by processors and overall speed of PCs at the time. Experimental works continued incrementally for two decades until PC's were able to accommodate the needs of the project, which now include the ability to produce 54" maximum smallest side canvas prints. This series is called the Wired series.

In 1995, he produced a series of digital collages examining advertising imagery and intents. These detournement artworks he called De-Advertising. They clearly exposed the subliminal intent of mass media marketing taken from a period where magazines were still standard purveyors of existing social norms. Some under-the-radar messages revealed in these works, have now become what many call the "new normal" in today's 2020's.

Around the year 2000 (and ongoing), he began devoting significant creative energy and time to producing social activist posters and detournement arts, responding to what he experienced as a total sellout of Humanity by the existing "political" class running the West. He produced over 100 posters used in numerous protest events across the country and has poster works shown and collected in the US and Europe. Also at this time, Sandy purchased his first digital camera, documenting the urban/suburban post-industrial landscape of America, producing numerous elegant archival photographic prints. He still carries a digital camera with himself daily.

In 2010, Sandy devised a series of whimsical, low tech, laid back, painted cardboard assemblages that were to function as a long term art installation at a Portland coffee shop. It was designed to work in that specific shop's varied, colored wall lounge environment to facilitate the pleasure-experience of the ubiquitous local Portland coffee culture.
 
His “Capitalism Sucks Art Show”, bitter sweet, humorous installation works since 2013, question “value” in society. Facing off Ram Board paintings of “things that are free” vs “things that are definitely not-free" in installations on the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area (such as the Fort Mason Art Market Expo 2013) and in New Zone Gallery, Eugene, 2019. All fitting in a pizza box. The “free” paintings were given away. The expensive paintings were priced at the average price of the object depicted. Such as $2 billion for a nuclear power plant.

In 2017, Sandy joined the New Zone Artist Collective in Eugene where he is webmaster, graphics specialist and a former Board Member. At the Gallery, he and Ralf Huber have teamed up for two social activist art installations. Two in 2022 and 2023 with another coming in November of 2024, named "Make Art Not War". He also sells Pop Shop Art objects there, like bleached + stenciled t-shirts posters, cards, bookmarks and "Zero" Dollars.

In 2018, he began a continuing series of artworks, The Art of Train Graffiti series, created from the documentary photos he takes of graffiti'd freight cars laid up on the railcar tracks in Mapleton, Eugene and elsewhere. He then adds his own digital and/or painted graffiti contributions on whole car compositions and free form multi-layered assemblage works, all on archival primed cardboard supports and constructions. The works present a potentially long term record of society's freight car graffiti activity and enable the public close up views not normally possible otherwise.