Estate Artist
Sandra Wittow
1935 – 2011 · Denver, Colorado
Narrative Figurative Oil · Estate
Sandra Wittow
"I work from the place where private experience becomes universal."
First woman to have a solo exhibition at the Denver Art Museum. Oil painter, figurative storyteller, and founding voice of Front Range Women in the Visual Arts. Her narrative paintings — worked on hand-stretched linen — draw on fairy tale, biblical text, and the mythologies of everyday life.
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Shark's Ink Collection ↗Biography
Sandra Wittow was born in Denver, Colorado in 1935. She studied at Cornell University, where she earned a BFA and counted the novelist Vladimir Nabokov among her most formative teachers — an influence visible in her paintings' literary interiority. She later earned an MFA from the University of Colorado.
Working always on hand-stretched and hand-sized linen canvas, Wittow described herself as a "narrative, metaphoric and figure artist." Her paintings are populated by figures caught in moments of transformation: the edge of a fairy tale, the threshold of a biblical scene, the point where private feeling tips into myth.
In 1984 she became the first woman to hold a solo exhibition at the Denver Art Museum — Disenchantment, a show centred on the universal emotional truths embedded in folk and fairy tale. The museum subsequently acquired her work for its permanent collection.
She was a founding member of Front Range Women in the Visual Arts and a central figure in Colorado's art community for five decades. Ten of her paintings were installed at the University of Colorado through the state's Art in Public Places program.
Her retrospective The Rose and the Briar was held at the Mizel Arts & Culture Center at the Denver JCC. Sandra Wittow passed away in Denver on August 6, 2011. Her 2013 memoir Thicker Than Paint: A Lifework, with over 100 reproductions of her paintings, remains the definitive record of her work.
In her words
"I work from the place where private experience becomes universal — where a fairy tale is also a biography, and a figure in a painting is both no one and everyone."
Education
- •BFA, Cornell University — studied under Vladimir Nabokov
- •MFA, University of Colorado Boulder
Collections held
- •Denver Art Museum (permanent collection)
- •University of Colorado (10 permanent works)
- •Shark's Ink B.A.T. Collection, Lyons, Colorado
- •Private collections across the United States
Recognition
First woman to have a solo exhibition at the Denver Art Museum
Founding member, Front Range Women in the Visual Arts (1979)
Colorado Art in Public Places — permanent installation, University of Colorado
Retrospective exhibition at the Mizel Arts & Culture Center, Denver JCC
A life in paint.
1935
Born in Denver, Colorado
1957
BFA, Cornell University — studied under Vladimir Nabokov
1965
MFA, University of Colorado Boulder
1979
Founding member, Front Range Women in the Visual Arts
1984
Solo exhibition Disenchantment, Denver Art Museum — first one-person show by a woman in the museum's history
1990s
Ten paintings installed at the University of Colorado under Colorado's Art in Public Places program
1995
Lithograph Traffic published by Shark's Ink, Lyons, Colorado
2001
The Rose and the Briar retrospective, Mizel Arts & Culture Center, Denver JCC
2011
Passed away in Denver, Colorado
2013
Thicker Than Paint: A Lifework published posthumously — 332 pages, 100+ reproductions
2014
Transit of Venus: Four Decades tribute exhibition, RedLine Gallery, Denver
Publications
Thicker Than Paint
Memoir · 2013
Thicker Than Paint: A Lifework
332 pages. Over 100 full-colour reproductions of her paintings. Published posthumously by Denver Rose Markus Press.
Find the book ↗Estate & Provenance
Collecting Sandra Wittow.
With the documentation it deserves.
Every work in the Wittow Estate comes with full provenance, family attestation, and a signed certificate of authenticity. No general marketplace offers this level of stewardship.