Sandra Schow, a living legend turning 89 in 2024, is a renowned artist from Idaho, USA who started out decades ago painting flat canvases. When Sandra began years ago adding small projecting effects, she realized just how much fun it would be to get really seriously three-dimensional. Sandra has been constructing contemporary sculptural assemblages from discarded objects and recycled materials, primarily wood, but sometimes add metal and glass for accent. The visual and tactile appeal of these pieces derives from strong geometric design, tantalizing textures, and vibrant acrylic colors. Most of the works are wall hung, but some are free standing. They vary considerably in size and color palette.

Occasionally, Sandra incorporates archetypal symbolism and playful whimsy, and has ventured into stylized Native American figures, but more typically the pieces are nonrepresentational, “art for art’s sake,” i.e. purely for aesthetic enjoyment. The work is for the most part highly detailed and labor intensive. Her approach is serendipitous were she tries to discover the forms that are inherently unifiable in my miscellaneous stash of reclaimed materials. Intuition plays a big part in her process.

Schow out of her aging and health conditions took a few years break and returned to show her work with San Francisco Street Gallery in Santa Fe, NM.