Career
Birk is a graduate of Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design (now Otis College of Art and Design) in Los Angeles.
In 2000, Birk exhibited an epic, pseudo-historical series entitled "In Smog and Thunder”, describing a "Great War of the Californias" in which Los Angeles and San Francisco wage all-out war for control of California, at the Laguna Art Museum. The series included such titles as "The Great Battle of Los Angeles". His "mockumentary" film of the same name has won numerous awards at film festivals across the country.
His series of idyllic landscape paintings of every one of California's 33 state prisons was exhibited at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum in 2001. A book has been published on the project, entitled Incarcerated: Visions of California in the 21st Century. In 2002, Birk expanded this project by depicting all of New York State's maximum security prisons in the style of Hudson River School artists from the 19th century. The project was exhibited in New York at Debs and Co. Gallery and works from the series are included in the collection of the New York Historical Society.
In 2005, Birk collaborated with writer Marcus Sanders on a rewriting and illustrating of the entirety of Dante's Divine Comedy, in which Dante and Virgil wander among the souls of the afterworld and discuss faith and philosophy with historical figures. The 13th century poem was translated into contemporary American English by Sanders, while Birk provided illustrations that adapt Gustave Dore's classic illustrations into 21st century imagery. Birk's illustrations were exhibited at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2005 and traveled to several institutions. The work was later published in three volumes.
A feature film adaptation of the Dante project, entitled Dante's Inferno was made by Birk and Sanders in collaboration with Paul Zaloom, Sean Meredith, and Elyse Pignolet. Starring the voices of Dermot Mulroney and James Cromwell as Dante and Virgil respectively, the film was featured at film festivals across the United States in 2007, garnering awards for "Best Director" at the Silverlake Film Festival and "Audience Favorite" at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival a.k.a. IndieFest.
In September 2009, Catharine Clark Gallery showed American Qur'an, an exhibition of fifteen sutras of the Qur'an which Birk inscribed in English and decorated with contemporary American scenes.
Read more about this topic: Sandow Birk
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