April 27, 1936 — November 22, 2021
Visual artist Sandra Ortiz Taylor was born April 27, 1936 in Los Angeles and died peacefully November 22, 2021 at the Frank Residences in San Francisco. Even as she taught and inspired hundreds of artists at City College of San Francisco for 35 years, she produced her own widely viewed assemblages and collages. She loved jazz, singing, cats, travel, and the dedicated artist friends who comprised her salon after she retired. On a trip to Hawaii, she wrote in her journal: "The places that hold me most are places of solitude, where we stand as very mortal beings in the face of our own mortality and the mystery that is human life and contemplate a nature which is beautiful and bountiful, beyond description, powerful and awesome ... where we get away from our everyday existence and take the time to listen to the waves, trees, feel the breath of the mountains on our faces and feel our links with life and death."
She is survived by her cherished partner, Dianne O'Connell; her sister, Sheila Ortiz Taylor, and Sheila's wife, Joy Lynn Lewis, of Tallahassee, Florida; and nieces Jessica Kimball (Guilford, Connecticut) and Andrea C. Young (Atlanta).
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