Early in the new millennium, Sanford started making “icon paintings” replacing saintly figures of Christendom with stars of Hip Hop. Sanford favored the stars of the gangsta rap genre that he and so many callow suburban white boys of his generation had grown up revering and imitating. Perhaps attracted to the rappers nihilist philosophies, or maybe he just liked blunts, 40s and buckets? Either way, presumably the paintings were made with the intent of iconoclasm as well as some sort of comment on cultural exploitation of black music the artist produced quite a number of these kitsch Frankenstein’s monsters in the first few years of the century. However Sanford seemed to stop this lucrative endeavor around 2004, presumably when these colonialist instincts were beaten out of him during graduate school critiques.
