Biography and Personal Statement
Victor Sparrow
(b. 1967, Boston, Massachusetts)

Growing up in the District of Columbia, that city's rich museum culture and political climate didn't fail to have an effect on me: As the oldest child in a single parent family, the museums became almost a second home to me. Throughout my high school years I drew and painted on my own, frequenting the Mall and its free museums for both entertainment and inspiration. In high-school, I was at turns, involved in Model UN, History and AP literature courses. Then, just as now, I was interested in the power of images and in making art that was about ideas.

During my four years at Brown, I pursued a course of study under their Art and Semiotics Program. This program combined media studies, Art History and studio production within the same core curriculum. My interest in Brown's Semiotics program was practical as I hoped that I might develop my own visual language by studying historiography and the visual languages of print, television and film alongside traditional art history.

After two years of academic study, I spent the first six months of my junior year at an American art school in southern France. As my first time abroad, this term allowed me the opportunity to visit European museums and develop an appreciation for classical history painting, most notably, Rubens' Medici Cycle and David's Rape of the Sabines. This experience proved pivotal as I was able to digest my academic coursework and put that information to use in my own creative work: In these large, vivid and imaginative works, I saw antecedents for film, commercial billboards and the daily newspaper- these narrative images corresponded to my theoretical studies in their use of classical iconography and mythology to depict and allegorize then- current events. Equally important, it was easier to determine how they were made by seeing them at a larger scale.

At that point, I realized the possibility of creating work that bridged the realms of antiquity and up-to-date (post) modernism. When I returned to Brown the following January, I went intent to explore art history for similar mass-media and 'pop' culture precedents.

I conceive of my work - paintings, assemblages and books - as a kind of postmodern 'history painting'. Within my own work, I am interested in collapsing the boundaries between 'high' and 'low', the personal and the political, the antedated and the modern. From a formal standpoint, I am interested in recycling materials in order to underscore the narration of history as a received cultural form. As a project of emphasis, I am interested in the parrallel histories of colonialism and syncretism in Europe and the New World. In my work, I make an effort to recycle the (for me) alienated goods of Western history, and personalize them through the sympathetic paradoxes of postmodern structuralism and black cultural form.

Last modified: January 14 2008
Edited by Andrew Boardman