Peter Sacks

Peter Sacks, a painter, poet, and academic, was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in 1950 and grew up in Durban. He studied political science and literature at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal after a term of medical school at the University of Cape Town. As an executive member of the Students Representative Council and a member of the National Union of South African Students, he became involved in the anti-apartheid movement. He visited Detroit as an exchange student in the late 1960s, where he witnessed yet another manifestation of the violent struggle for racial justice that marked his homeland. Sacks actively participated in the anti-apartheid struggle while attending the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, until he was drafted into the military. He spent three months in military training before heading to Princeton University, where he discovered poetry.

He received his Master of Arts from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and his PhD from Yale University, and he painted privately while writing several books of literary scholarship and poetry. Sacks started his career as an English professor and was granted tenure at Johns Hopkins on the basis of a single definitive publication,The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats, in 1985. He also was a lecturer at Harvard University. He is the author of multiple poetry anthologies, including Necessity (2002). His poetry frequently explores the complex relationship between South Africa's beautiful landscape and painful history. His intellectual interest in elegy informs his continuous explorations of mythic, historical, and personal loss in poetry.

His massive cardboard paintings served as inspiration for the sets he designed for Peter Brook, most notably for the 2009 production of Sizwe Banzi is Dead at Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, Paris. In 2022, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University hosted Sacks' first solo exhibition, Peter Sacks: Resistance, which included his series of portraits showing portraits of historical and contemporary figures notable for resisting political, racial, or cultural oppression over the past two centuries. His intricately layered artworks are in various private and public collections, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Constitutional Court Art Collection, and the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights. He has had solo exhibitions at the Robert Miller Gallery and the Marlborough Gallery. Furthermore, Sacks had solo exhibitions at Sperone Westwater in 2021, 2022, and 2024.

Sources:

https://www.speronewestwater.com/artists/peter-sacks#tab:slideshow [Accessed 30 August 2024]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/peter-sacks [Accessed 30 August 2024]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/25/an-artists-archeology-of-the-mind [Accessed 30 August 2024]