During the year of 2012 Sanford elected to exclusive paint people (mainly celebrities) who died that year. Whitney Houston was perhaps the most prominent death of the year, and among the most tragic as well. Sanford imagines Whitney’s death bed, a bathtub in which she drowned at the Beverly Hills Hilton the night before she was scheduled to perform at the Grammy Awards.
Sanford painting, based on Roger Van Der Wydens’ Deposition (1435-40), depicts the September 6th, 1996 assassination of Tupac Shakur. Sanford’s painting, which casts police officer Kevin Gaines as the gunman, working on behalf of Marion “Suge” Knight, is based on Russell Poole’s investigation into this yet unsolved murder that was later laid out in Randall Sullivan’s 2003 book LAbyrinth.
Sanford’s imagination of a Tea Party Rally puts Rush Limbaugh as the chef deplorable of the American far right. Even Sanford couldn’t imagine the rise of Donald Trump.
Sanford’s Caravaggio inspired painting depicting a fight that broke out during the 2004 Vibe Awards between G-Unit and Death Row records when a man approached Dr. Dre and the attacked him. Rapper Young Buck stabbed the attacker and fled the venue.
While visiting Copenhagen for his first solo exhibition at Gallery Poulsen, Sanford became aware of a fight between Shepard Fairey and some far left Danish street punks. Apparently Fairey had been jumped about a month before when leaving his own after party for an exhibition at V1 Gallery. Gallery Poulsen, where Sanford was exhibiting, was in the same neighborhood V1 and the club outside which the innocent occurred. Sanford made a painting, gathering key details form the press coverage of the even as well as a brief email exchange with Shepard Fairey. As the attackers identifies were unknown Sanford cast a few local bad actors whom he had met in the painting as the bad guys.
Of all of Sanford’s distasteful artwork, this painting may be the most violently reviled. In this painting Sanford imagines the horrific scene at the Alrosa Villa night club on the night of December 8th, 2004, when Dimebag Darrell Abbott was murdered on stage by a crazy fan.
This painting is of a real life event that did take place. Sanford made this painting based on oral interviews he conducted with several people who attended the afterparty for Lisa Reuter’s 2002 exhibition “Follow the Boys” at Leo Koenig Inc. There seems to be no record remaining of this event on the internet. We will let sleeping dogs lay.
The financial disaster of 2008 was pretty hard on the Tom Sanford “market” affectively ending the artist’s viability for his at the time high end art galleries. As for many other young artists at the time, the collapse lead to a cratering in demand for Sanford’s work and at least one very bad auction result. Sanford elected to have a sense of humor about the turn of events and made this rather humorous treatment of the event, even as his galleries distanced themselves from the young painter.
Sanford’s painting of the stampede of shoppers at the Valley Stream Long Island Walmart on November 28th, 2009 that killed one Walmart employee.
In this tableau, Sanford imagines a fictionalized and fantasized version of Michael Jackson’s final resting place at the Neverland Ranch using a Hans Holbein painting of dead Christ as a jumping off point.
In this painting, shaped as a tombstone, Sanford imagines Osama Bin Laden’s final resting place after having been assassinated by America Navy Seals during a raid of his compound in Abbottabad Pakistan, May 2nd 2011.
March 4th, 2000. 50 Cent was stabbed by rapper Black Child outside the Hit Factory recording studio. The incident was a further escalation in the “beef” between 50 Cent (G-Unit) and Ja Rule (Murder Inc.).
This painting depicts the February 27th 2001 shot out that occurred in front of the Hot 97 radio station in New York City. Typical to his work, Sanford’s version of events as shown in this painting is far from accurate as several of the rappers shown were probably not present at the actual event.