Peter M. Sacks
Peter M. Sacks (born 1950) is an expatriate South African painter and poet living and working in the United States. Life Sacks was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and grew up in Durban, where he was educated at Clifton School (Durban) and Durban High School. His father was an obstetrician and taught at a black medical school. Sacks also studied medicine before transferring to the political science program at the University of Natal. As a student he gave speeches and organized anti-apartheid demonstrations. Sacks served a few months in the military, which was compulsory at the time, before receiving a scholarship to Princeton University. After Princeton (B.A. 1973), he attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar (M.Phil. 1976), and Yale University (PhD 1980). Sacks taught English at Johns Hopkins University between 1980 and 1996, being promoted to full professor in 1989. Since 1996, he has been a professor of English and American literature and language at Harvard University. His first wife was Barbara Kassel, a painter and teacher of painting. Sacks married Pulitzer-prize winning poet Jorie Graham in 2000. In 1999, during a residency at Marfa, Texas, Sacks began painting over photographs using thick white acrylic. Although he had been making small scale paintings in notebooks for many years, which he had chosen to keep private, this led to an interest in working on canvas and a decision to exhibit. He now shows his work in New York and around the world. Art Sacks' first two solo shows were in Paris, at Galerie Pièce Unique, in 2004 and 2007. The first U.S. solo show in 2009 of his finely textured paintings at Paul Rodgers/9W Gallery in New York City received a review in Artforum (November 2009) by Rosalind Krauss. Following that show, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston acquired large triptychs. In 2010, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts acquired another triptych from an exhibition at the Wade Wilson Gallery. A show of "New Paintings" at Paul Rogers/9W Gallery from October 2012 to January 2013 elicited considerable critical reaction. In 2014 while represented by the Robert Miller Gallery he exhibited show of large scale works, the Aftermath Series. The show featured a catalogue by Christopher Bedford. Besides the introduction of stronger color in works focused around Mandela and Gandhi, the show also revealed a new emphasis on works on paper. In February 2015 the Ivorypress Gallery in Madrid exhibited 66 works on cardboard--"pages" of a book titled "The Kafka Series." In these, wherever typed and handwritten text appeared, it was mostly drawn from Kafka's The Trial. Many of those paintings are on cardboard taken from used and labeled FedEx boxes. Sacks was until recently represented by the Marlborough Gallery, New York. An April 2017 solo show, Peter Sacks: New Works featured his Township Series and was accompanied by a catalogue introduced by Sebastian Smee. A subsequent show, Peter Sacks: Migrations, at Marlborough Fine Art, London in 2018, featured a new body of