Sandow Birk and Elyse Pignolet

Born in Detroit, Michigan; lives in Long Beach, California.

Birk and his wife, practicing artist Elyse Pignolet, collaborated on their Tamarind lithographs, A Conservative Map of the World and A Liberal Map of the World, tongue-in-cheek renditions of world geography. Made in the style of old maps, each pictorial vignette around the border has a counterpoint in the companion map--Fox News and National Public Radio, UC Berkeley and West Point Academy, for example--and places are identified through a political lens.  

They often produce works together, including a series titled “The 99 Names of God.” In 2012, SFJAZZ Theater (San Francisco, California) commissioned American Idioms, a series of murals by Birk and Pignolet.