about

“I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.” Marcel Duchamp 

Untitled Observations Nov 8 commencing 7:30 PM Lunar Eclipse Self Portrait I spacetime Mecox Inlet to the Atlantic Ocean Watermill 

2004 

Pigment Print on Cotton Rag

7.5” x 13.5”

Hope Sandrow is a conceptual artist whose multidisciplinary art practice is her ‘way’ of life. Real engagements with the world inform and direct Sandrow’s artistic vision. In the mediums of still, video, mixed media, installation, sculpture, new media, performance, and social practice she creates artworks that engage in the natural history of everyday life to (re)generate discourse on nature, culture, art, identity, gender, science, history, the politics of power and myth. At critical times, such as now, and like that of the viewer, Sandrow’s role is as a participant. In works that involve interaction between artists, the public, and the natural world, she is an observer.

Since March 2006, Sandrow’s practice has structured itself on her ongoing project as artist-in-residence, open air studio shinnecock hills spacetime. Referencing the social and cultural history in and around her own “backyard” 24/7 in the Shinnecock Hills, open air studio spacetime was originally inspired by a Chance Encounter with a Padovana rooster, while walking amidst the Shinnecock Hills.

open air studio spacetime is a study within a micro-environment, paralleling the macrocosm of the Earth.

The recent interviews (below) explore the interrelationship of Sandrow’s art, life, and the creative process within art history.

• Hope Sandrow Chance Encounter: Art, Life, and Activism in Open Air Studio

• Pollack Krasner House Art and Study Center, Art of Change: Hope Sandrow (March 10, 2022)

• Hope Sandrow Speaks with ArtForum  (May 2016,  14 minutes, edited from a 2-hour interview)

• Live Media, Hope Sandrow, Sculpture Magazine 2013

• New York Times: Hope Sandrow: Feathering Her Nest (2009)

New York Times: Feathering Her Nest (2009) photo: Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

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 19th Century.

After suffering childhood traumas, including repeated sexual abuse and harassment, 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 first passed by Congress, setting a timetable for each state to establish quality standards.

Sandrow’s art practice often parallels her life experiences. Amid a culture of systemic abuse she found a promise in place-making art. The synchronicity, between the personal and the public caused Sandrow to associate the assaults on her body with that of the earth, air, and water. This is the conceptual context that is explored in all her work including open air studio spacetime.

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 seminal 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.

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 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 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 fought 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.

Awards:

Sandrow is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts awards as well as, New York Foundation for the Arts, Artist - New Works; The Warhol Foundation; Skowhegan Governor’s Award, among others. See the complete list.

Citations on her work include:

ArtForum; Art in America; ArtNews; Bomb; Flash Art; The New York Times; Southampton Press; Sculpture Magazine, and The Washington Post.

A guide to this website:

The NOW section of this website is an elaboration of all the projects produced by Sandrow since 2006 (and ongoing) that are part of open air studio spacetime. This includes commissions, exhibitions, collaborative works, conceptual practices that are based and grounded in Sandrow’s everyday life, 24/7.

Sandrow’s intensive research also gives an extended history of the East End of Long Island as well as a closer look at Shinnecock Hills and how artists, such as William Merrit Chase explored the area and how developers and railroad people changed the landscape. The research is implicitly interwoven with every project Sandrow does.

Throughout Sandrow’s career as an artist, she has implicated herself and her art practice in the environments she is and was a part of — this includes where she lives now in the Shinnecock Hills back to her life in Manhattan as part of the art community of the East Village to her projects that addressed the changing environment of the island of Manhattan to activating the Artist and Homeless Collaborative. a project she received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

The AND part of this site is the connecting tissue between the worlds and Sandrow’s projects. This section elaborates Sandrow’s installation work, exhibitions, and projects that took place between 1990 and 1998.

The THEN section of this website is a cross-over of time and space - hence space-time. It is living in a narrative flow that comprises a life of exhibitions, installations, commissions, and projects that took place between, 1980 and 1992

May 8, 2020 Stay-In-Place open air studio Shinnecock Hills spacetime.

Running time: 2 min.

Conceived, written, filmed, and directed by Hope Sandrow. 

Commissioned by The Parrish Art Museum for the project, "East End Artists in Quarantine" curated by Senior Curator of Arts Reach and Special Projects, Corinne Erni.