open air studio spacetime is a “home” site (founded 2006) for creating art and engaging in timely matters thru the lens of history making (Note 1) and remaking itself within the continuum of space and time. A laboratory for experimentation during times of critical planetary change in climate, society, and culture. Sandrow’s intention is to present the natural history of everyday life, while regenerating discourse on nature, art, culture and history. Issues of identity, gender, science, and the politics of power and myth are also at play, representing a sustainable collaboration with the more-than-human-realm reflecting the inter relationships of living organisms to one another and their physical environment.


“Duchamp delighted in the fact that the “Large Glass” shattered while being transported, the jagged cracks further confounding and fragmenting the object's chance encounter with the real world. Rather than offering escape into a story or environment, the environment is framed and focused by the work of art, and its story is ever subject to change, like the physical state of the artwork itself.” (Note 2)


The genesis was a Chance Encounter (Surrealist doctrine of objective chance) with a Padovana white cockeral (March 28, 2006) in woods (designated Shinnecock Indian Contact Period Village Fort Critical Environmental Area within Cultural Resources Protection Overlay District) inhabited by First Peoples 14,000 years ago. He followed her home (Note 3): soon after Sandrow followed the white cockeral across the road, to Hills latterly preserved (2008) in hand with their descendants Shinnecock Indian Nation.


At the time, subjects of her study Untitled Observations spacetime (2001 - 2007) were stars including our sun, moon, planets and Galileo Galilei in relation to beliefs and practices; contemporary events such as 911 that Sandrow observed. (Including) Alignments of the five planets (pictured r,Untitled Observations May 15 commencing 1:30am Self Portrait spacetime Conjunction of Five Planets) and the appearance of white roosters (Note 4) interpreted by some cultures as portents of things to come. Why, the role of chance (or destined?) happenings was timely: remarkably the cockeral’s feathered crest resemblance to North American Indian's Eastern Woodland headdress regalia (pictured r). And, the city of Padua home for Padovana’s and Galileo.


“Sometimes when you’re looking for one thing, you find something completely different and unexpected”. 

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics


open air studio Shinnecock Hills spacetime is a platform evoking critical discourse about “now”, the “everyday” for Sandrow as an artist in residence in Shinnecock Hills as then (1891 -1914) plein-air painter William Merritt Chase (Note 5) that her project title shows hommage (2006). In 2020, she learned her Cottage/Studio “may be carriage house to William Merritt Chase” (Note 6). Chase founded the Shinnecock Summer School of Art (1891 - 1902), the most respected open air painting school in the United States. He and his family also kept a flock of chickens, and his conservation efforts, memorialized in his landscape paintings of Shinnecock Hills, are rooted in Sandrow’s art practice merging art, life, social practice and activism.


Her artworks and Installations, often outside the parameters of the “white cube”, compose an interdisciplinary art practice exploring sociological and ecological effects of human domination of the natural world in the geologic times of the anthropocene. For example, the priority of economic prosperity over all else -  what is “valued” - has placed the Shinnecock Hills community, the world at great risk jeopardizing the health of ecosystems that provide clean air, water and food. This projects proposed transformative - not transactional - change via the medium of the creative process is necessary to prevent further depletion of nature and the natural world. As the trajectory of human development has been paralleled by the chickens journey - from jungles to forests to farms and backyards (Note 7) and poultry farms - considered markers within the transformation of the biosphere.


Unfolding in front of a lens through which she embraces chance, creates art encompassing the mediums of still, video, mixed media, sculpture, new media and social practice existing through the bounds of overlapping disciplines. open air studio engages colleagues and the public in collaboration and dialogue considering the “place” of art and culture. This has led to proposals for companion open air studios in Bali and Komodo, Indonesia (Note 8): these exchanges reveal her commitment to local and global activism, and desire to connect eastern Long Island coastal communities to those who’s existence also threatened by rising seas.


open air studio spacetime coexists on multiple layers, displaying relationships between the personal and public, her backyard to neighbors and those on the other side of the world. A 24/7 on site practice sustained by ecological interrelationships. Including the micro and the macro: a Hen's egg posed upright while candled resembles stars, moons and planets.The process of laying an egg begins after light sensitive cells behind the Hen’s eyes message her ovary to release an ovum into the egg yolk. Fertilized by sperm, coated by albumen as the egg travels through the oviduct. This creative process encompasses twenty-four hours; as the rotation of earth on its axis.

"...the problem about the egg and the hen, which of them came first, was dragged into our talk, a difficult problem which gives investigators much trouble. And Sulla my comrade said that with a small problem, as with a tool, we were rocking loose a great and heavy one, that of the creation of the world."  Plutarch Table Talk, Moralia 120 ADStudies/Entries/2007/6/10_Observational_Findings.htmlshapeimage_2_link_0

open air studio spacetime founded (2007) and directed by conceptual artist Hope Sandrow whose multidisciplinary art practice is a ‘way’ of life; real engagements with the world to inform and direct her artistic vision.


Realized with the continuing support of Agnes Gund. Sandrow’s collaborator in life Ulf Skogsbergh; inspired by grandparents Pearl and Morris Liebman, granduncle William Zucker. This ongoing project also made possible by Dorothy Lichtenstein, Lowery Stokes Sims and Elizabeth Kirrane (Museum of Arts and Design), George Tetzel, Virginia Shore and Claire D’Alba (Art in Embassies), Andrea Grover (Parrish Art Museum), Tom Edmonds (Southampton History Museum), Drew and Susan S. Fine.  An artist project fiscally sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts: tax-deductible donations can also support this ongoing project.

(l, above) Folly open air studio Shinnecock Hills spacetime 9” x 9‘ x 9‘ Glass and Wood Cube, Dahlia Plant Tag, Steel Circle Lay Bare 2012 (Found Hurricane Sandy, October 29, 2012); (r) Eastern Garten Snake open air studio Shinnecock Hills spacetime


top of page, l to r, untitled observations, The Sky is Falling, Chance Encounter

second row, William Merritt Chase with students on Shinnecock Hills by Albert Chittenden; third row, Hope Sandrow on Shinnecock Hills by photo credit  Ambrose Clancy; fourth row The Other Side, The fabric of time and space, Portrait of a Chicken as an Egg (Candled) within A Golden Rectangle open air studio Shinnecock Hills spacetime

Note 1: The primary focus is Shinnecock Hills within the Shinnecock Indian Contact Period Village Fort Critical Environmental Area where open air studio is sited. A history documented in newspaper articles following LIRR service to the east end (realized 1869) after seizure (1859) of more then 4000 acres of lands from Shinnecock Indian Nation by the Town of Southampton. When women exercised their right to own property.


Note 2: Marcel Duchamp’s works of art had a profound impact on Sandrow as a young girl, the artist she is today.

Large Glass  the first work of art and Duchamp the first artist that Sandrow recalls experiencing, at the Philadelphia Musem of Art.  “Looking at Dada” Authors Sarah Ganz Blythe, Edward D. Powers, Cassandra Heliczer, Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)  2006 page 14


Note 3:  Sandrow encountered the white cockeral on hills within the former Colt Estate (1891 - 1946). Ownership on maps attributed to: William M. Colt (1894), M Colt (1902 and 1916), William B. Colt (1916). A 1891 deed named Jane Borrowe Colt, of which there were two: one married to E. Boudinot Colt, the second Jane B. was her sister Mary and her husband Morgan G. Colt’s daughter Jennie aka Jane B. The Manor home burned to the ground (July 1951)... see what “remains”....what “lays bare”.


Note 4: The origins of white Padovana Shinnecock never learned by Sandrow. At the time of his mysterious appearance she went door to door but no neighbors claimed him, none of their flocks included his breed.


Note 5: Sandrow’s photographs and research accompanied by a hand distributed petition (2002) persuaded Town of Southampton’s Board to preserve public access to a bay beach pictured in Chase’s oil painting (1892) of his family “At the Seaside”.


Note 6: (2006) Sandrow titled this project in homage to Chase’s art practice: (2020) She was informed by neighbor John Hunt to read the Town of SOUTHAMPTON HISTORIC SURVEY that describes her Cottage/Studio: “The structure moved to current location”; “1891; may be carriage house to William Merritt Chase ”.  Illustrating that the world is full of chance (or destined?) happenings. “The William Merritt Chase Homestead is listed on the State and National Registers. It is a shingle-clad gambrel-roofed building with a Doric- columned porch. Attached is a shorter, smaller shingle-clad gambrel-roofed structure. It is generally accepted that Stanford White, of the architectural firm, McKim, Mead, & White, made sketches of this structure.”


Note 7: Her “backyard” includes a Carriage/Gatehouse: “The structure moved to current location: Town of SOUTHAMPTON HISTORIC SURVEY (April 2014 ) Shinnecock Hills Multiple Resource District: “a small gambrel roofed structure clad in wood shingles with dormers, twelve-over- twelve-light windows, and multiple additions. The structure likely dates to the early 20th century. Believed to be the former gatehouse for a larger property known as the Condon Estate (designed by Long Island architect Grosvenor Atterbury ca. 1906); it is also said to have been designed by Grosvenor Atterbury.


Note 8: Prisms of chance are Sandrow’s medium to study cultural and social history, the natural world of three coastal sites: Shinnecock Hills New York first inhabited 10,000 BC; Pacific Islands Komodo 11,000 BC and Bali (Silangjana)1,000,000 BC. And shared practices (on hold due to the global pandemic: open air studio Silangjana spacetime (Bali, with Sudipa Yasa Family and Kekur’s cockeral Rwa and Hen Bhineda) and open air studio Komodo spacetime (Sea of Flores with Mikel Albaran Valle) Indonesia. As collaborative offsite components of the Art in Embassies commission The Fabric of Time and Space spacetime permanently installed (2018) in US Embassy Jakarta. Lands where the Indonesian heritage chicken Kekur (Green Jungle Fowl) forage freely in backyards: common ground was found with Sandrow, her Padovana flock and life as an artist.


“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness... Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”   Albert Einstein, 1951 (Sandrow’s birth year)

Sandrow embraced the riddle  “why did the chicken cross the road?”: possibly a “folly”, for the cockeral Shinnecock, named for where we met, to be my guide, muse.” And like the creation narrative in the garden of Eden, snakes appeared, (two) apple trees sprouted, took root in her living art installation where Shinnecock and his family flock find shelter.