Conversations is a blog that reflects on the intersection of my art and my activism.
While I have a website about my primary life’s work as an artist (SandyBleifer.com), I am pleased to launch BleiferInPrint.com, a website that features my publications, prints, and clothing designs, and acts as a forum for some of my extended creative enterprises and interests. Even though I provide links to purchase my work, this site will be geared at featuring the extracurricular work of artists I know and most admire for reaching beyond their studios to try to impact the world around them.
Artists, like any others who venture into uncharted waters, need the support and acknowledgement of their peers. Having strived for over 50 years to develop a body of work that is uniquely mine while simultaneously being active in community building, it is particularly gratifying to be acknowledged for both.
I can only start to work on a piece when there is a confluence of image or subject with a particular paper. At the same time, I consider the methodology I want to employ (e.g. printing, painting, tearing, burning, etc.). For me, paper is not only a surface for the image but a painting and sculpting material in and of itself to be transformed into an element of the image. I never throw away an interesting scrap of paper – some date back to my early experiments in printing and papermaking.
In this time of interruption and restraint, I have welcomed opportunities to reach beyond the conventional art networks into new realms with shared interests. I am honored to be featured in the current newsletter from the Arpana Aneesha Studio operated by Aneesha Parrone.
As the artists age and die off, their work is increasingly being left to heirs and others ill-equipped to carry on sales and marketing efforts. My artist friends and I are in a quandary about what to do.
Memorials have been in the news lately with the Black Lives Matter Movement spotlighting the impact of Civil War era statuary and memorials have certainly been a staple of art practice throughout time.
In working on the seventh of my PAPER series of monographs entitled PAPER: Social Practice, I came face to face with the recognition – a long time coming – that my extracurricular activities in business, teaching and community activism were not disconnected from my process-based art practice and were, in fact, an essential part of it.
There was to have been a well-orchestrated commemoration centered at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics when the athletic events would have been halted at the exact moments of the bombs dropping on Hiroshima August 6th 75 years ago and on Nagasaki on August 9th. My dear friend, Richard Fukuhara, had been orchestrating a ringing of bells throughout the country at those two moments in coordination with the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki until his untimely death last year. The global pandemic has forced the cancellation of the Olympics and prevents the full range of public programs planned throughout the world. This occasion must not pass by unnoticed.
I’d like to invite you to watch a video recently posted as part of An Artist a Day project, a daily 15-minute, live, online show hosted by Dr. Chris Lee (via Zoom) and featuring artists from around the world speaking of their work, their process, and their responses to the current state of things.
While the primary purpose of this website is to share conversations, I welcome you to explore my own work.
Discover creations by Sandy Bleifer, available for purchase.
SANDY BLEIFER, a long time committed social activist with a focus on social justice, urban revitalization, and our current environment crisis, received her B.A. in Fine Arts at UCLA in 1962 and worked as an Artist in Residence for the Beverly Hills Schools and Central High, a continuation high school in downtown Los Angeles, as well as an art teacher, docent and publisher of curriculum materials in the arts.
Under the aegis of “Space,” a seminal Los Angeles gallery under the direction of Edward Den Lau, she exhibited and sold her work from the early 1970s through 1997 at many galleries and museums including the Downey Museum of Art, University of California, Berkeley, Loyola Marymount University, Mt. St. Mary’s College, the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Riverside Art Museum, Chapman College, Palos Verdes Art Center and the art rental galleries of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Her work is included in the collection of the Albuquerque Museum of Art, New Mexico; the Kitakamakura Museum, Japan; and in many private and corporate collections including those of ARCO, IBM, Faberge, Neutrogena, and Security Pacific Bank. She is included in a recently published encyclopedia of Los Angeles artists before the 1980’s, by Lyn Kienholz. In 1975, the City of Los Angeles commissioned her to paint a mural on the Hayvenhurst underpass of the Ventura freeway. It can still be seen there and has been included in the definitive compendium of mural art in Los Angeles, Street Gallery by Robin J. Dunitz. Long a social activist, Bleifer concluded a six-year project to present her Hiroshima/Nagasaki Memorial Project to audiences in the U.S. and Japan in 1995.