Jim Sanborn

Jim Sanborn was born in Washington, D.C., in 1945. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, and a Master of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in New York City. Sanborn’s large outdoor installations address a variety of themes, including the collection and analysis of information and, in the artist’s words, “making the invisible visible.” Besides his numerous public commissions, Sanborn’s work has been exhibited by many museums, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. In addition to Kryptos for the CIA headquarters, Sanborn has completed four GSA Art in Architecture commissions: Kryptos (1990) for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters in Langley, Virginia; Indian Run (1995) for the U.S. Courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland; Ex Nexum (1998) for the Old Post Office and U.S. Courthouse in Little Rock, Arkansas; and Binary Systems (1999) for the Internal Revenue Service computing center in Martinsburg, West Virginia.