Sandy Skoglund

Courtesy of the Artist and Holden Luntz Gallery

Sandy Skoglund is an internationally acclaimed artist whose work explores the intersection between sculpture, installation art, and photography. Her large-format photographs of the impermanent installations she creates have become synonymous with bending the ordinary perception of photography since the 1970s. Her constructed scenes often consist of tableaux of animals alongside human figures interacting with bright, surrealist environments. Skoglund’s blending of different art forms, including sculpture and photography to create a unique aesthetic, has made her into one of the most original contemporary artists of her generation.

The Formative Years

Sandy Skoglund was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts. She studied art history and studio art at Smith College in North Hampton, Massachusetts, later pursuing graduate studies at the University of Iowa. While moving around the country during her childhood, Skoglund worked at a snack bar in the Tomorrowland section of Disneyland and later in the production line of Sanders Bakery in Detroit, decorating cakes for birthdays and baby showers. These experiences were formative in her upbringing and are apparent in the consumable, banal materials she uses in her work. Experimenting with repetition and conceptual art in her first year living in New York in 1972, Skoglund would establish the foundation of her aesthetic. Using repetitive objects and carefully conceived spaces, bridging artifice with the organic and the tangible to the abstract.

Exhibitions, Awards and Grants

Skoglund has often exhibited in solo shows of installations and photographs as well as group shows of photography. Esteemed institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Chicago Art Institute, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum in New York all include Skoglund’s work. She is a recipient of the Koopman Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts for Hartford Art School, the Trustees Award for Excellence from Rutgers University, the New York State Foundation for the Arts individual grant, and the National Endowment for the Arts individual grant.

Skoglund’s Unique Aesthetic

Sandy Skoglund has created a unique aesthetic that mirrors the massive influx of images and stimuli apparent in contemporary culture. She painstakingly creates objects for their part in a constructed environment. The work begins as a project that can take years to come to completion as the handmade objects, influenced by popular culture, go through an evolution. Skoglund organizes her work around the simple elements from the world around us. Cheese doodles, popcorn, French fries, and eggs are suddenly elevated into the world of fine art where their significance as common materials is reimagined. The carefully crafted environments become open-ended narratives where art, nature, and domestic spaces collide to explore the things we choose to surround ourselves within society. Skoglund treats the final phase in her project as a performance piece that is meticulously documented as a final large-format photograph from one specific point of view. A full-fledged artist whose confluence of the different disciplines in art gives her an unparalleled aesthetic, Skoglund ultimately celebrates popular culture almost as the world around us that we take for granted.

Sandy Skoglund Artwork that is either photography or installations has been exhibited and is in the collection of: Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Chicago Art Institute Museum, Chicago, Illinois; Cincinnati Museum of Art, Cincinnati, Ohio; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; Dayton Art Institute Museum, Dayton, Ohio; Denver Museum of Art, Denver, Colorado; Eastman House International Museum of Photography, Rochester, New York; Fondation Nationale d’Art Contemporain (FNAC), Paris, France; Fotografiska, Stockholm, Sweden; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington; High Museum of Fine Arts, Atlanta, Georgia; Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, Tenn.; J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; Lowe Museum of Art, Coral Gables, Florida; Maison Europeene de la Photographie, Paris, France; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Metz Fondation Pour la Photographie, Metz, France; Mjellby Museum, Halmstad, Sweden; Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea; Museo Pino Pascali, Polignano a Mare, Italy; Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design, New York, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal, Canada; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana; Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, California; Princeton University Museum of Art, Princeton, New Jersey; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea; St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri; Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, Florida; University of Kentucky Museum of Art, Lexington, Kentucky; University of Massachusetts Museum of Art, Univ. of Mass., Amherst, Massachusetts; University of Richmond Museum, Richmond, Virginia; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; Yale University Gallery, New Haven, Conn.