Barry Sanders

Founding Executive Co-Director

Barry Sanders’ projects occur increasingly at the intersection of art and activism, and include The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism, which Project Censored named one of the top-ten censored stories of 2009, and “Over These Prison Walls,” which invites collaborations between artists and incarcerated youth. 

He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and is the author of fourteen books and over fifty essays and articles, including Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History, Alienable Rights: The Exclusion of African-Americans in a White-Man’s Land, 1619–2000 (with Francis Adams) (winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award), ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (with Ivan Illich), The Private Death of Public Discourse, and A Is for Ox: The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age. 

His book-art projects include a collaboration with printmaker Michael Woodcock, Fourteen Ninety Two or Three, which won Honorable Mention in the Carl Hertzog Awards Competition for Excellence in Book Design, while his 2002 essay for Cabinet, “Bang the Keys Softly: Type-Writers and Their Dis-Contents,” has been reprinted in Courier (University Art Museum, SUNY) as well as in Ghost in the Machine (New Museum). He has given presentations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (with Ivan Illich); the J. Paul Getty Museum; and the Portland Art Museum, among many others, and in 2013, curated the show Infinity Device with Anne-Marie Oliver at the Historic Maddox Building in Portland, Oregon.

He was the first to occupy the Peter S. and Gloria Gold Chair at Pitzer College, where he taught, among other things, the history of ideas and medieval church iconography. He co-founded and chaired the MA in Critical Theory and Creative Research Program at the Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies, Pacific Northwest College of Art, where he taught for close to a decade