Arts & Entertainment

With Concrete As a Canvas, Sand Painter Pours Out His Art

First, Joe Mangrum sets up his boundaries, using four plastic buckets to roughly mark off a square. He rests a ringed binder filled with photographs of his artwork on a table he’s set up nearby. Then, he gets to work.

From a dozen or so Ziploc storage bags, he grabs handfuls of sand dyed in colors of the rainbow and begins pouring it out, creating paintings that tend, he said, to find their own way. “It’s a very spontaneous process. I just start with a dot in the center and, from the center out, create designs off the fly,” said Mangrum, 43, who transforms New York City pavement into art each week. 

When he was 8, Mangrum’s mother enrolled him in his first painting class. He continued that pursuit, taking art courses in high school and studying at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After earning his bachelor’s degree, he spent four years traveling across Europe and the United States, exploring different art forms.

At the end of that leg of his journey, he settled in San Francisco. “It was a free and liberating place where people could be themselves,” Mangrum said. He stayed for the next 15 years, making a name for himself and gaining a following.

“It is the performative aspect of his work that is amazing,” said David McFadden, curator at the Museum of Art and Design, where Mangrum’s work is in the current “Swept Away” exhibit. “Our museum strives to reveal artistic transformation through materials and process, and Joe is a prime example of that transformative action.”

Auto parts, ceramic tiles, bricks and random household products were among the media with which Mangrum experimented before stumbling, he said, upon sand-only as a medium. Arriving in New York in 2006 solidified that.

“There was a lack of space and it was expensive to use other materials at first,” Mangrum said. “I had lost the networks I created in California, which made doing street paintings the most viable way of showing off my work.”

Mangrum’s sand pieces are done strictly by hand and require more than five hours to finish, he said. He purposely infuses his work with symbols such as plants, DNA strands and sea creatures to “bring a connection to the planet and find universal symbols that affect everyone,” Mangrum said. “People are naturally connected to nature but don’t realize how distant they are from it.”

Curator McFadden said he chose to feature Mangrum in the “Swept Away” exhibit, showcasing artists working with nontraditional materials, after viewing his work online and seeing it in Central Park. It is Mangrum’s first showing at the Museum of Art and Design, though his resume includes being spotlighted at a variety of venues. He and his work were on a Sesame Street episode. The All Points West Festival in Jersey City, N.J.’s Liberty State Park and Coachella Festival in Indio, Calif., commissioned him for installations. For Fashion Week 2010 in New York City, he did a sand painting for designer Jen Kao’s runway show.

“It is a great honor to be recognized by the art community,” Mangrum said. “It gives me the opportunity to share with the public and is a sign that I can do more as my career goes on.”

On Twitter @Han_Eric.