Details:

The artist used photos from her personal family archive to create this narrative painting of vulnerability, honesty and candor—exploring the unique reaction and look of a person when their image is being captured by someone they know and love.
Unframed

① Artwork:

Untitled

The artist used photos from her personal family archive to create this narrative painting of vulnerability, honesty and candor. The artist's paintings explore the unique reaction and look of a person when their image is being captured by someone they know and love—or at the very least trust. Sanders's practice is driven by the desire to remember those in-between moments where a community of people is just existing. For the artist, those are the moments that validate our humanity and our existence.

About her work, Sanders says: "I create paintings that are representational of my experiences of Blackness and the importance of the space and time in between. I focus on the depiction of Black life—not the spectacle or its aftermath—but the moments of transition or pause, where next moves are being negotiated, connections are being made and thoughts are being collected. As a Black person living in America, I find myself inundated either with imagery of the world 'happening' to the Black community, or imagery of our resilience and response to those happenings. We are much more than our collective pain."

Specs:

48 inches
36 inches
2 inches
36 inches

③ Artist:

Michon Sanders

Michon Sanders uses photos from her personal family archive to create narrative paintings of vulnerability, honesty and candor. The artist’s work depicts transitional moments in Black life—not their spectacle or aftermath—where moves are negotiated, connections are made and thoughts are collected. Michon Sanders’s paintings respond to the proliferation of mass media images of Black communities in distress by representing the artist’s personal experience of Blackness.

BIO:

Michon Sanders was born in Michigan and raised in Tallahassee, Florida. The artist received a BFA from California College of the Arts in Oakland in 2021. 

A solo exhibition of Sanders’s work took place at Friends Indeed Gallery in San Francisco, California (2022).

Sanders won the AXA Art Prize juried by Julia Chiang, Erik Parker, Laurie Simmons and Salman Toor. The artist received a scholarship to Anderson Ranch in Colorado.

Sanders currently lives in Los Angeles, California, where she is pursuing an MFA at the University of Southern California.

Michon Sanders:
Untitled, 2021
Oil on canvas
36.0 × 48.0 inches /