Art/Women/California Parallels and Intersections 1950-2000

 Edited by Diana Burgess Fuller and Daniela Salvioni

"Black women operate in a variety of intellectual and aesthetic areans and find inspiration in disparate social, cultural, and political agendas. In addition, Black women embrace and espouse varying ideas about the role of artists, audiences, and the social implications of art. For instance, Sandra Rowe's Slave Series (1992) draws from the diverse intellectual traditions, cosmologies, spiritualities, values, aesthetics, artistic practices, cultures and histories of African people on the African continent in their diaspora."

Artist and Influence 2000 Volume XIX

Editors James V. Hatch, Leo Hamalian, Judy Blum

"I then realized that I was willing to do anything to make art. I would spend my last nickel on art supplies rather than go buy clothes. I realized when I left undergraduate school, with my arrogance of knowing everything, that I was willing to commit time, effort, and money to being an artist. Now I know that's what I am and there's not anything I can do about it. "

Expanding Circles

 An Anthology Edited and Complied by Betty Ann Brown 

"If the piece is doing what is should do," says the artist, "it will affect you in some way. If I've answered the questions as I should and put sweat into it, the work will have a depth, an intensity, like Blues lyrics."

American Vision August 1989, Cover "Sandra Rowe: Practitioner of a Healing Art" 

"Her work reflects the complexity of human relationships as she explores the interaction between male and female, female and female and person and object, frequently rendering her figures androgynous."

"She hopes that her work `will change [the viewer's] vision of what art can be.' Art can be risky when it deals relevant issues that affect many, she says. Her works continue to present tormented figures in tormented relationships as both she and they work toward resolutions through the medium of paint."

Traversing The Circle 

Essays by M. A. Greenstein, Mary Alice Cline & Sandra Rowe

"Like many of today's avant-garde, Rowe began in a more traditional mode. If asked who influenced her most, the answer is characteristically direct. She denies any affinity to the new York School of Abstract Expressionists of the 50s. On the contrary, in the imagery of forms she was first fascinated by that of Michelangelo because of the magnificently strong women he portrayed. Later, becoming acquainted with the work of Charles White, she saw that their depictions of Afro-American women had the same power and strength, a realization that had profound effect upon her painting. The other great influence she acknowledges is that of her mentor, Charles Gaines, whom she calls a role model for her commitment to artmaking and intellectual searching."

Sandra Rowe: Installations

Essay by Margaret Lazzari, Paul W. Watkins Gallery, Winona State University

"Sandra Rowe has confronted racism and sexism repeatedly in her life, and repeatedly in her work. She believes deeply that ignorance is harmful, even deadly. The stories she tells are the experiences of individuals, whose bodies and lives absorb the wounds of hatred, ignorance, and oppression. Though racism is a social phenomenon, Rowe recreates its impact on the person. Against the injustice of racism, she shows the faces of individuals, hints at what happened to them, or presents remnants of their lives. Amid broad social issues, the viewer remembers that racism is implemented by the aggregate of single willful acts by individuals against individuals."