Eve Sandler

Eve Sandler is a multi-media visual artist whose installations, paintings, videos, and sculpture often commemorate Black female identity, culture, memory, and the sacred. Born in 1957 in Harlem, New York, Sandler has exhibited her artwork internationally at museums including the Smithsonian Institution, the Frans Hals Museum in Holland, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the New Orleans Museum of Art. She has received numerous grants and awards for her work, most recently a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship for Video.

Sandler’s autobiographical works of the past decade employ personal narratives, and increasingly use video to reveal, confront and heal what is buried, silenced, and most painful in our society. She creates compelling installation environments and video works of astonishing beauty and mystery that disarm and draw the viewer into the work, so that they can not distance from the unfolding and often unsettling drama that lies beneath the surface. Curator Debra Willis-Kennedy writes “her visually arresting work conjures memory.”

Sandler’s painterly vision is evident in her video THE WASH: A Cleaning Story, which intimately explores the artist’s body and memory for scars and survival of childhood sexual abuse. THE WASH: A Cleaning Story, Sandler’s first video for independent viewing, was awarded a 1999 New York State Council on the Arts Media Distribution Grant and hailed by Black feminist author Barbara Smith as “a beautifully creative treatment of an all too often common women’s experience.” The video has been screened at numerous festivals in the past year including Outfest: Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Festival, Women In the Director’s Chair, the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Festival and the Denver Pan-African Film Festival. THE WASH video is closely related to her installation series of the same title that explores inter-generational female secrets in her family.

Other recent works include Sandler’s haunting installation Mami Wata Crossing which premiered at The Painted Bride Arts Center in Philadelphia and incorporates projected video, live fish, original sound and still projections as well as rare family photographs and artifacts. Mami Wata Crossing is a poetic invocation and journey evoking the ocean as a site of crossings, loss, and continuity. It references the middle passage, legendary African mermaids, and the Southern ancestral legacy of slavery in the artist’s family.

Eve Sandler is currently working on an experimental documentary, THE GIFT, which explores a true life mystery and strange inheritance discovered by Sandler after her grandmother Mary Wade Alexander’s death in 1994. THE GIFT journeys from New York’s upper Westside and Harlem, to the cotton fields of Enfield, North Carolina, documenting a complex family history and rich multi-cultural heritage, as it examines Eve’s grandmother’s life for clues and evidence surrounding an extraordinarily family secret. Sandler also founded and directs Women In Mourning And Outrage which creates dramatic forms of protest. (05/00)

The Wash: A Cleaning Story
A film by Eve Sandler, 1999, 9 min., Color
Written, directed and produced by Eve Sandler, THE WASH is an autobiographical video narrative. This painterly work, which was shot in Hi-8, closely ...