Stan Sanders was born during the summer of 1942 in the middle bedroom of a three-bedroom house in Watts that is still owned today by the Sanders family. He was the youngest of five children, and the only one to be born during wartime limitations on occupying hospital beds on the front lines of WWII’s Pacific theatre. It was in Watts, in 1970, that he co-founded, along with key staff at LACMA, the Black Arts Council, the earliest and most successful effort at consolidating the artistic expression that exploded in the years immediately following the Watts Riots in 1965.
Sanders’ work with the Black Arts Council, a community-based art-advocacy organization that included local collectors, artists such as David Hammons, John Outterbridge, John Riddle, and Noah Purifoy, art institution-builders like Dale and Alonzo Davis of the Brockman Gallery and Aurelia Brooks, and, importantly, the curatorial staff and security detail at LACMA, most notably Claude Booker and Cecil Ferguson. Sanders served as Legal Counsel for the organization, and as liaison to the Watts Summer Festival, which Sanders had founded in 1966 along with fellow Jordan High School alumni Billy Tidwell and Howard Curry.
It was during this high-point in the American art landscape, the highest point since the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930’s, that Sanders began his own collection of contemporary Black art, beginning as a young lawyer bartering his professional services for works of art from the local artists, all struggling but clearly on the verge of making profound impacts on 20th Century American culture. Fifty years later this collection, with others, is a trail-blazing genre included in permanent collections of museums worldwide.
Sanders wrote about this cultural awakening among urban U. S. Blacks in 1968 in an article in Black Voices’ entitled “I’ll Never Escape The Ghetto”.
Sanders is active in Los Angeles politics. For 14 years, he was Mayor Tom Bradley’s president of the City Recreation and Parks Commission where he led the effort to form the Watts Towers Art Center that was later transferred to the jurisdiction of the Cultural Affairs Department. He served in 1993 as co-chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Art and Culture in Los Angeles, out of which grew the Cultural Affairs Department and a significant expansion of the City Municipal Arts Department. In 1993 he was himself a candidate for Mayor.
Sanders was part of a small group of Mayor Bradley supporters who put together the proposal in 1973 to the L. A. Community Redevelopment Agency for what became the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). He later served on the MOCA Board of Trustees from 1985-1995.
In addition to Jordan High School, Sanders is the educational product of the public schools in Watts. He attended Whittier College, from which he won a Rhodes Scholarship in 1963 to Oxford University, the first selection of an African American in 55 years for that Scholarship and only the second African American ever selected in the 112-year history of the Rhodes Scholarship. An All-American football player at Whittier College, Sanders was also a national collegiate discus champion in 1963. After Oxford, he took a law degree from the Yale Law School.
A corporate lawyer, Sanders formed the first Black corporate law firm in California in 1973, with offices directly across from LACMA that housed the first gallery space for African Art on Wilshire Boulevard. The first contributions of contemporary Black art to the permanent collection at LACMA were donated by the Sanders & Tisdale law firm. As a lawyer, Sanders, in addition to the Black Arts Council, has served as Legal Counsel to the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) denomination, Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company and former Special Counsel to former President of Nigeria, Olushegun Obasanjo.
Sanders was, formerly, Vice-Chairman of the U. S.- South Africa Leader Exchange Program, a founding Trustee of the NCAA Foundation, a Trustee of Whittier College, a member of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission that brought the Raiders and the Clippers to L. A., and a MTA Board member. He is presently the Chairman of the Board of the Inner City Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles.
Sanders continues to live and practice law in Los Angeles—and to support young emerging artists, especially from the inner city. He is married to the former Debbie Philpot, and is the father of four adult children and the grandfather of eight.