Morgan Sanders

Sanders earned a B.A. in Literature at Reed College in 1955.{{cite web|title=Reediana Briefs|website=Reed Magazine|url=http://www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/march2017/articles/reediana/briefs.html|date=March 2017|accessdate=24 February 2018}} She wrote Alexander and the Magic Mouse (1969).{{cite book|title=The Branwell Snitbook: The Complete Branwell Snit Cat Comix|last=Sanders|first=Morgan|publisher=CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform|date=2016|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=qmAEvgAACAAJ|isbn=9781534773943}} under the nom de plume Martha Sanders. It is a children’s book about an Alligator from China who lives with an Old Lady, a Brindle London Squatting Cat, a Magical Mouse, and a Yak.{{cite journal|title=For Young Readers|journal=New York Times|last=O'Connell|first=Margaret F.|date=8 February 1970}} Although Sanders was a working artist, the French illustrator Philippe Fix was responsible for the pictures. According to one reviewer in 1970, it "make(s) the book the success it is." The same reviewer likened the colors of Fix's illustrations to "yesteryear's tintypes," which "set the Victorian scene and show Alexander to best advantage." Sanders created her own illustrations for Branwell Snit, a comic strip that appeared between 1975 and 1977 in Wisdoms Child, a pennysaver in New York City. The comic strip similarly featured a cast of talking animal characters: Branwell F. Snit, a cogitating prodigy feline named after Branwell Brontë and based on Sanders's actual cat of the same name; Monroe, an undifferentiated bird; and Kenneth, a shaggy dog. In 2016, Sanders published her entire Branwell Snit comic strip series in The Branwell Snitbook: The Complete Branwell Snit Cat Comix.{{cite journal|title=Morgan Sanders, Creator of Famous Comic Strip, Publishes First Poetry Collection|last=Fields|first=Linda|journal=Pike County Courier|date=10 April 2019|url=https://www.pikecountycourier.com/news/local-news/morgan-sanders-creator-of-famous-comic-strip-publishes-first-poetry-collection-LCPC20190411190419988|accessdate=23 August 2022}}

Throughout her adult life, Sanders wrote poetry, which eventually "approached the Wordsworthian ideal of natural and yet heightened language."{{cite book|title=Looking for Lola: Poems and Drawings by Morgan Sanders|last=Sanders|first=Morgan|publisher=CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform|date=2018|isbn=978-1719229401}} In 1975, one of her poems was included in an anthology of works by contemporary female poets.{{cite book|title=We Become New: Poems by Contemporary American Women|editor1-last=Iverson|editor1-first=Lucille|editor2-last=Ruby|editor2-first=Kathryn|location=New York|publisher=Bantam Books|date=1975|page=170}} Sanders published a collection of her poems and a selection of her drawings in Looking for Lola: Poems & Drawings by Morgan Sanders, which was released in 2018. Most of the poems were written while she was living in New York City in the 1960s.

In 1973, Morgan Sanders was a founding member of SOHO20, the second all-women cooperative art gallery in New York City.{{cite journal|last=Lubell|first=Ellen|title=SoHo 20|journal=Womanart|volume=1|number=1|date=Summer 1977|page=16}}{{cite book|editor1-last=Broude|editor1-first=Norma|editor-link=Norma Broude|editor2-last=Garrard|editor2-first=Mary D.|editor2-link=Mary Garrard|title=The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact|publisher=Harry N. Abrams, Inc.|location=New York|date=1994}}{{cite journal|last=Bergantini Grillo|first=Jean|title=Soho 20: A Diverse Women's Gallery|journal=The Feminist Art Journal|volume=5|number=2|date=Summer 1976|pages=36–37}}{{cite web|url=http://soho20gallery.com/about/organization-history/|title=SOHO20 Gallery: Organization History|website=SOHO20 Gallery| accessdate=24 February 2014}} For her initial exhibition at SOHO20 in early 1974, she showed three-dimensional wall constructions that combined painting and found objects.{{cite journal|title=Art|journal=New York Magazine|date=18 February 1974|page=26|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=2g0N2Va-Fb8C&q=morgan+sanders+artist&pg=PA26|accessdate=24 February 2018}} In his review, the art critic Peter Frank described the "progressions of dissimilar elements" as "episodic" and praised their suggestion of "a stream-of-consciousness narrative, with rapid, exhilarating changes of venue."{{cite journal|last=Frank|first=Peter|title=On Art|journal=SoHo Weekly News|date=14 February 1974}} At SOHO20 in 1975, Sanders exhibited four sets of photographs and three large paintings that depicted the aging interiors of turn-of-the-twentieth-century architecture on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, including Tiemann Place.{{cite journal|title=Art|journal=New York Magazine|date=3 March 1975|page=24|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=DekCAAAAMBAJ&q=morgan+sanders+artist&pg=PA24|accessdate=24 February 2018}}{{cite journal|last=Lubell|first=Ellen|title=Arts Reviews: Morgan Sanders|journal=Arts Magazine|volume=49|number=9|date=May 1975|pages=13–14}} The paintings, which showed the "marble of a lobby, metal work of a bannister, floor tiles, and masonry details," were segmented in a collage-like manner. A large nocturnal view of her apartment was similarly "disjointed," as if "the canvas was painted in sections," according to a reviewer in the New York Times.{{cite journal|last=Raynor|first=Vivien|title=Art: Representation Is Alive in SoHo|journal=New York Times|date=30 December 1977}}

Sanders increasingly turned to photography in the late 1970s and began to create photographic series, such as Harlem Walls and Trucks.{{cite journal|title=Piston-Packin' Mama|journal=New York Magazine|date=18 February 1980|page=67}} She showed Harlem Walls at the New York Public Library.{{cite journal|title=Love Those Big Mother Trucks|journal=Bellingham Herald|date=17 September 1982}} Trucks was exhibited at The Camera Club of New York in 1980, and at the Viking Union Gallery in Bellingham, Washington shortly after Sanders moved there in 1982. The next year, she showed a photographic series called Flowers and Stones at Fairhaven College.{{cite journal|last=Harris|first=John|title=Photographer Takes Long Look at Flowers and Rocks|journal=Bellingham Herald|date=7 October 1983}} Shot with a telephoto lens, the works were meant to be seen from a distance of 20 to 25 feet, which made the flowers "become the dipping and sweeping figures of dancers in flowing gauze gowns," in the words of one reviewer. By the end of the 1980s, she was photographing the countryside in Whatcom County, Washington.{{cite journal|title=Behind the Shutter: Morgan Sanders|journal=Taste: Bellingham's Magazine for Fine Living|volume=2|number=2|date=August 1989|pages=24–25}}

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Category:1934 births

Category:2021 deaths

Category:American feminist artists

Category:Artists from Salt Lake City

Category:20th-century American photographers

Category:20th-century American women painters

Category:20th-century American painters

Category:20th-century American women photographers

Category:21st-century American women photographers

Category:21st-century American photographers