SAN DIEGO, CA.- The third installment of the San Diego Museum of Art’s acclaimed Contemporary Links series will present eleven commissioned etchings by the provocative West Coast artist, Sandow Birk. Titled Leading Causes of Death in America, the prints take a humorous look at a normally serious subject and are loosely based on a selection of images from SDMA’s collection of 149 lithographs by George Bellows, the early 20th-century American Realist artist who was associated with the Ashcan School.

For more than fifteen years, Sandow Birk, who is based in Long Beach, California, has been successfully appropriating the look and imagery of well-known historical prints and paintings to create poignant satires of contemporary American life. His eleven etchings for SDMA, including an introductory title page, borrow from the imagery, techniques, and compositions of a number of lithographs by Bellows. Several works by Bellows that Birk draws from will be presented in the exhibition in addition to other important prints by Honoré Daumier, Edouard Manet, John Sloan, and Paul Cadmus, some of which the artist directly references as well.

Like Bellows, Birk is a sharp observer of the impact of the changing city and social mores on the lives of citizens. He is known for his astute yet humorous social commentary on topics ranging from consumerism to popular culture. In the past Birk has parodied works by other famous artists, including the 18th-century British painter and printmaker William Hogarth. He has also appropriated the styles of 19th-century American landscape painters such as Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt.

In Leading Causes of Death in America, Birk reveals the way American’s live, focusing on why we die by drawing on current research on disease trends like a medical anthropologist. He depicts the causes as excess—too much smoking and drinking, overeating, compulsive consumption of junk food—which result in heart attack, diabetes, stroke, cancer, lung disease, or liver disease. Even his depiction of accidents suggests an excess of external stimulation that distracts us from paying more attention to what is at hand. With these and other recent works, Birk joins the ranks of the illustrator-commentator printmakers (like Bellows, Hogarth, and Daumier) who, with wit and skill, reveal poignant aspects of society through visual imagery.

Sandow Birk created the prints for the SDMA exhibition at the Hui No'eau Visual Arts Center in Makawao, Maui, Hawaii, where he is working closely with master printer, Paul Mullowney, to create etchings that simulate the rich tones and gradations and blacks that characterize the Bellows lithographs.

Born in Detroit in 1962, Birk received a BFA from the Otis Art Institute of Parson’s School of Design. He has been featured in solo exhibitions throughout California, including at the Koplin del Rio Gallery in Los Angeles (2003), and has a forthcoming show opening in late May at PPOW Gallery in New York. Birk was also included in Made in California: 1900–2000 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2000). He is a recipient of the J. Paul Getty Fellowship for Visual Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts travel grant to Mexico.

The Museum’s annual Contemporary Links series commissions noted contemporary artists to respond to works in SDMA’s collections. The series debuted in 2003 with Regina Frank’s memorable performance and installation, Whiteness in Decay, a work inspired by Juan Sánchez Cotán’s Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber. In 2004, the Pakistani-born artist Shahzia Sikander responded to a display of eighteen paintings from the Museum’s Edwin Binney 3rd Collection of South Asian art in the thought-provoking mixed-media installation, Flip Flop.