Morgan Sanders

Sanders earned a B.A. in Literature at Reed College in 1955.[1] Under the nom de plume Martha Sanders, she wrote Alexander and the Magic Mouse (1969),[2] a children’s book about an Alligator from China who lives with an Old Lady, a Brindle London Squatting Cat, a Magical Mouse, and a Yak.[3] Although Sanders was a working artist, the French illustrator Philippe Fix was responsible for the pictures, which, according to one reviewer in 1970, "make the book the success it is."[3] The same reviewer likened the colors of Fix's illustrations to "yesteryear's tintypes," which "set the Victorian scene and show Alexander to best advantage."[3] Sanders created her own illustrations for Branwell Snit, a comic strip that appeared between 1975 and 1977 in Wisdoms Child, a pennysaver in New York City.[2] The comic strip similarly featured a cast of talking animal characters: Branwell F. Snit, a cogitating prodigy feline named after Branwell Brontë and based on Sanders's actual cat of the same name; Monroe, an undifferentiated bird; and Kenneth, a shaggy dog.[2] In 2016, Sanders published her entire Branwell Snit comic strip series in The Branwell Snitbook: The Complete Branwell Snit Cat Comix.[2][4]

Throughout her adult life, Sanders wrote poetry, which eventually "approached the Wordsworthian ideal of natural and yet heightened language."[5] In 1975, one of her poems was included in an anthology of works by contemporary female poets.[6] Sanders published a collection of her poems and a selection of her drawings in Looking for Lola: Poems & Drawings by Morgan Sanders, which was released in 2018.[5] Most of the poems were written while she was living in New York City in the 1960s.[4]

In 1973, Morgan Sanders was a founding member of SOHO20, the second all-women cooperative art gallery in New York City.[7][8][9][10] For her initial exhibition at SOHO20 in early 1974, she showed three-dimensional wall constructions that combined painting and found objects.[11] In his review, the art critic Peter Frank described the "progressions of dissimilar elements" as "episodic" and praised their suggestion of "a stream-of-consciousness narrative, with rapid, exhilarating changes of venue."[12] At SOHO20 in 1975, Sanders exhibited four sets of photographs and three large paintings that depicted the aging interiors of turn-of-the-twentieth-century architecture on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, including Tiemann Place.[13][14] The paintings, which showed the "marble of a lobby, metal work of a bannister, floor tiles, and masonry details," were segmented in a collage-like manner.[14] A large nocturnal view of her apartment was similarly "disjointed," as if "the canvas was painted in sections," according to a reviewer in the New York Times.[15]

Sanders increasingly turned to photography in the late 1970s and began to create photographic series, such as Harlem Walls and Trucks.[16] She showed Harlem Walls at the New York Public Library.[17] Trucks was exhibited at The Camera Club of New York in 1980,[16] and at the Viking Union Gallery in Bellingham, Washington shortly after Sanders moved there in 1982.[17] The next year, she showed a photographic series called Flowers and Stones at Fairhaven College.[18] Shot with a telephoto lens, the works were meant to be seen from a distance of 20 to 25 feet, which made the flowers "become the dipping and sweeping figures of dancers in flowing gauze gowns," in the words of one reviewer.[18] By the end of the 1980s, she was photographing the countryside in Whatcom County, Washington.[19]