Eugene weekly., January 19, 2017, Page 12, Image 12

‘BELIEVERS, WHY DO YOU SAY ONE THING AND DO ANOTHER? IT IS HATEFUL TO GOD THAT YOU SAY THAT WHICH YOU DO NOT DO.’ — AMERICAN QUR’AN
A M E R I C A N
Q U R ’ A N
The holy book of Islam, interpreted by an American artist
T
he traditional holy book of Islam has been defaced, burned, defecated on and
denounced in the decade and a half that’s followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by
Islamic extremists on New York and Washington.
A new exhibition opening Friday and running through March 19 at the Jordan
Schnitzer Museum of Art presents a very different American reaction to the Qur’an.
In American Qur’an, the museum’s spacious main
gallery will be full to bursting with the scores of original
paintings that make up Los Angeles painter and lifelong
surfer Sandow Birk’s reflection on the Qur’an.
The artist created his own illuminated manuscript
version of the entire Qur’an, mixing scenes of contemporary
American life with the 114 suras, or chapters, of the
1,400-year-old sacred text in English translation. The work
took him nine full years and resulted in a 427-page coffee-
table book that’s been published by a division of W.W.
Norton & Co.
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January 19, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com
“I’ve been following this project for years,” says Jill
Hartz, the Schnitzer’s executive director. “We are the
second museum — and the first academic museum — to
show it.”
The exhibition originated in 2015 at the Orange County
Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California.
Born in Detroit, Birk grew up in Los Angeles from the
age of 6. “When I was a little kid I was really impressed by
the beach,” he says in a telephone interview. “My parents
took me to the Redondo Beach pier, and I saw surfers for
the first time.”
BY BOB KEEFER
That was a turning point in his life — and in his art.
“I started surfing when I was 11 and have been surfing
ever since.” As an adult, Birk has surfed oceans around
the world, in such places as Indonesia, the Philippines,
India and Morocco — all countries with large Muslim
populations.
After graduating in 1983 from Otis Art Institute — now
the Otis College of Art and Design — in L.A., he saw most
of his classmates head east to make their way in the then-
booming New York art world. Birk stayed home. “I was
never going to move to New York,” he says. “I was a surfer!”
Instead he became a consummate southern California
artist, a prolific painter of scenes, based in European
history painting, depicting Los Angeles in its glory and
its decadence. In one series, Birk imagines the results of
a war between Los Angeles and San Francisco; in another,
echoing work by 19th century landscape painter Thomas
Cole, he follows Los Angeles from prehistoric times to an
imagined apocalyptic future.