Lisa Sanditz

Lisa Sanditz’s paintings combine desolate scenes and brilliant colors, capturing, as she describes it, “the ways the marketplace and the wilderness intersect, overlap, and inform each other.”

She used her Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to China to continue her exploration of that country’s industrial landscapes and its single-industry cities, such as JinJiang (Shoe City) and Zhuji (Pearl City). She exhibited the paintings resulting from her several trips to China in a number of group shows, including CRG Gallery in New York City; Galleria Glance in Torino, Italy; ACME Gallery in Los Angeles; and at the Shanghai Art Fair. “Sock City,” her third solo show at CRG, featured her works on paper and canvas depicting her vision of the city of Yiwu.

The daughter and granddaughter of art museum docents, Lisa Sanditz received a B.A. in studio art from Macalester College (1995) and worked for four years at the Precita Eyes Mural Arts Center in San Francisco before continuing her art studies at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, where she earned an M.F.A. in painting (2001). On graduating from Pratt, she not only worked as a prop stylist and project manager for Blue’s Clues International but also was a visiting artist at SUNY Purchase, the University of New Orleans, Rhode Island School of Design, among other U.S. schools, and the University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm, Sweden.

Her first solo show in New York City—“Season’s Tickets” at CRG— opened in the spring of 2003. The following year her solo show “Best Buy” was mounted at the Rodolphe Janssen Gallery in Brussels, and her fifty-foot mural was included at in the group show “637 Feet” at the Queens Museum in New York City. Another large-scale work, “Tie-dye in the Wilderness,” a site-specific painting commissioned by Creativetime and United Technologies, filled a billboard in lower Manhattan in 2005. Other group and solo shows followed steadily, and her first museum solo show “Fly Over” was a feature of the Kemper Museum’s season in 2006-07.

Her works are in the several private collections and the permanent collections of the Columbus Art Museum, The Fogg Art Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, among others.