Below is a list of my publications.
Wholesale booksellers, please contact me for information as to how to order.
Returning to work full time in the studio in 2012 after a 15-year hiatus to orchestrate the Hiroshima/Nagasaki Memorial Project and to implement a vision for the revitalization of downtown, Los Angeles, I felt it was important to compile a complete history of my oeuvre. What was the evolution of ideas over time? What were the underlying “constants”? Where were the intervening experiences outside the art world going to take me going forward? I produced a 4-volume compendium of all of my work from 1974 through 2004, which I realized was, consistently, of, on and about paper.
Paper: Volume 1
Volume 1 focuses on Architecture and Landscape subjects executed in Silkscreen, Collage and Drawing from the period of 1974 to around 1981. Hardcover book: $150.00 on Amazon. E-book available for free download.
Paper: Volume 2
Volume 2 focuses on the Natural and Urban environments and was executed primarily in Hand Made Paper roughly from the period of 1982 to around 1993.
Hardcover book: $150.00 on Amazon. E-book available for free download.
Paper: Volume 3
Volume 3 focuses on Portraiture and The Figure executed in silkscreen, hand made paper and mixed media throughout that 30-year period. Hardcover book: $111.00 on Amazon. E-book available for free download.
Paper: Appendix
The Appendix contains Biographical Information, Exhibitions, Reviews and Announcements documenting my career during that period. Hardcover book: $115.00 on Amazon. E-book available for free download.
Downtown Up
A photographic narrative of the return to economic and social viability of downtown, Los Angeles, which began in the mid-1990s. The pictures simulate a focused walk through the Historic Core - its rich architectural detail, its human-scaled density and its reconnection to the modern office towers on Bunker Hill - looping back to the Central Business District and graphically illustrating how the built environment - both old and new - made the present revitalization possible. ISBN: 978-1-7330719-0-1 Available on Amazon.
Bradbury Building
A photographic essay exploring one of the most iconic buildings in downtown Los Angeles, capturing the amazing quality of light that transcends even its extraordinary architectural detail. The book is a tribute to, not only the building's namesake and architect, but to Ira Yellin, the visionary developer who engaged preservation architect, Brenda Levin, to sensitively restore a National Register Historic property and downtown's crown jewel. ISBN: 978-1-7330719-1-8 Available on Amazon.
Saving the Venice Walkstreets Photographs of the Venice Walkstreets and residents’ commentary as the Venice community, led by Sandy Bleifer, strove (successfully) to retain the configuration of these neighborhoods and to protect them in city planning records as historic and cultural assets. ISBN 978-1-7330719-2-5 Available on Amazon.
Monographs
PAPER: Persona
The “life casts” of the artists’ face and body merge self-portraiture with gestures of paper with the figure exerting its presence. The Circus Costumes” velcroed to the leotards of the dancers are metaphors for the dichotomy between our jobs/functions and our inner lives. ISBN: 978-1-7330719-3-2 Available on Amazon.
PAPER: Angels
The figure in flight conjures up a familiar female archetype – an angel - an arbiter between human suffering and transcendence. The use of the female figure – long a staple of Western artistic iconography – may be interpreted in a contemporary context of women’s issues or as a matriarchal figure embodying the world’s suffering. The “Shrine of the Angels” series utilize color photo Xerox printouts of the source image for the Angels, each one incorporating a lighting element and on a scale that can collectively be installed as a shrine. ISBN: 978-1-7330719-4-9 Available on Amazon.
PAPER: Walls
The Walls and Graffiti series explores connections between the artist’s vocabulary of paper manipulation and treatment techniques and the nature of architectural elements. Hand made paper, art papers and silkscreen collages express the nature of a wide variety of surfaces and bear the effect of age and wear. As such, the Walls testify to the vulnerability as well as the resilience of life itself. ISBN: 978-1-7330719-5-6 Available on Amazon.
PAPER: Southwest
The several Southwest series express the recognition that the landscape of various regions embody infinite combinations of basic rock formations and colorations and, as such, share the nature of the printed multiple as individualized by printing and after-treatments. Subjecting the prints to the forces of nature and chemical and mechanical degradation mimics the forces of nature on the landscape. ISBN 978-1-7330719-5-6 Available on Amazon.
PAPER: +Metal
The Metal/Drawings juxtapose the inherent qualities of metal and paper: hardness v. softness, strength v. vulnerability. The drawings are on newsprint, which darkens and becomes even more brittle over time. Burning the paper to produce ash makes the paper even more fragile. Nevertheless, the drawings cling to their metal supports while the metal continues to rust at a slow pace. Rusted metal is a recurrent foil to the qualities of paper in Bleifer’s ongoing work. ISBN: 978-1-7330719-7-0 Available on Amazon.
PAPER: Screens
Sandy Bleifer uses the folding screen as an architectural element in a room, as a pictorial device that provides a linear presentation of a subject through time, various lighting conditions and vistas and as a way to visually express shifts of thematic material in music compositions. Like the scroll, the folding screen format turns the simultaneous experience of viewing a painting into a process of revelation. ISBN: 978-1-7330719-8-7 Available on Amazon.
PAPER: Social Practice
Sandy Bleifer uses paper and figurative imagery to evoke social and political issues. Her work engages the audience via interactions with freestanding and wall hung sculptural installations. Her intention has been to bring about far reaching social change by further involving the viewer/participant through adjunct programming as well as contemplation of the artwork. Using photographic documentation, she traversed the world of urban redevelopment to preserve neighborhoods and architectural features of historical and cultural significance. ISBN: 978-1-7330719-9-4 Available on Amazon.
"The Times Kimono Series" documents the process and finished project of a major series of 9 mixed media Japanese kimono-shaped, two-sided paper sculptures that respond to tragic current events depicted in newspaper photographs. Available on Magcloud
"Paper +Leaves" showcases a body of work that utilizes a collection of dried pressed leaves collected in the 1920’s. The purpose of this series is to juxtapose paper with leaves – a natural material – along with industrial materials, revealing the commonalities as well as highlighting the differences to explore a wide range of topics from death, aging, relationships, environmental pollution, and world affairs. Available on Magcloud
Ikebana Series
The Ikebana series, an unabashed homage to the Japanese art of floral arrangement. The series has yielded some of Bleifer’s most directly pictorial work, some of her most colorful, and some of her most painterly. For once, she centrally engages the traditional figure-ground formal relationship that is a fundament of Western painting and, to the same extent but in a different way, Eastern. She has expansively broadened the range of her visual texture. Clearly, Bleifer has allowed herself to indulge here with an almost Matissean regard in the luxe, calme et volupté of the “oriental” manner.
But the Ikebana works are not without visual austerity. Their images are lush, but their contrasts and contours are stark. The works are structured with a sometimes-startling theatricality – a theatricality whose harsh lucidity recalls that of Kabuki and Noh. The textures, optical and physical, may be sensuous, but they readily combine the coarse with the gentle. There is a constant oscillation between the new and the worn: Bleifer cites sabe no wabe, the high regard held by the Japanese for the qualities of age, as a philosophical influence. In the Ikebana series she highlights those qualities through contrast with the young and fresh, so that the portrayal of a single plant, at once luxurious and agitated, evokes both its beginnings and its end. – Peter Frank, art writer/curator, 2017
Ikebana Series cloth bound book, clamshell box + original artwork
A cloth bound clamshell box containing a hardcover cloth bound version of the 86 page Ikebana Series book and your choice of a paired original limited edition art collages from Ikebana Details created especially to accompany this set.
$500 + tax and shipping
Ikebana Series
Softcover, 86 page, full color 12” x 12” book
Signed by Sandy Bleifer
$60 + tax and shipping
Each available for purchase directly from Sandy Bleifer.
Hiroshima/Nagasaki Memorial Project (Catalog)
Archival catalog of a traveling exhibition of paper sculptures as an artistic response to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 produced by artist, Sandy Bleifer. The exhibition along with community, artistic and educational programs traveled to 3 cities in the US and to Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Osaka in 1995, the 50th anniversary of the bombings. Available for purchase and a free PDF download at Blurb.
Project Report
Archival materials documenting the Hiroshima/Nagasaki Memorial Project, a body of art work and related community, educational and ancillary events that comprised a traveling exhibition commemorating the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki upon the 50th anniversary of those events. This report accompanies the publication, Hiroshima Nagasaki. Available for purchase and a free PDF download at Blurb.
Holocaust Series (Catalog)
A body of three dimensional figurative paper sculptures combined with wood and construction materials representing the interment of people in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. Strips of mold-infected papers symbolize the striped uniforms that were worn. The works remind us that these were once vibrant healthy people who were brutalized and killed in the concentration camps. Available for purchase and a free PDF download at Blurb.
Social Practice (Catalog)
Interview by Suvan Geer and selection of Sandy Bleifer’s work up to the early 1990s. Softcover, 11” x 10”, sepia, 30 pages, chop and signature of the artist $10.00 + tax and shipping Available for purchase directly from Sandy Bleifer.