Cheryl Medow

Swallow-tailed Bee-eater on a Poison Ivy Branch, from Envisioning Habitat Series

2025

California artist Cheryl Medow creates images that entice the viewer to enter the natural world and envision her wild birds, in imaginary and real environments. Using classical and contemporary tools, Medow layers her photographs, weaving them together to create visual narratives. Cheryl Medow’s background in the arts is diverse. Medow studied ceramics at the famed Chouinard Institute and received a BA in Art from UCLA, concentrating on life drawing with charcoal and pastels. Continuing her art education, she studied printmaking at Hand Graphics in Santa Fe, New Mexico and digital printmaking with Mac Holbert and John Paul Caponigro in Santa Barbara. With this classical training in the arts and her new found twenty-first century tools, including digital photography and Photoshop, Medow found her calling: traveling around the world searching for birds to photograph and creating new images in her studio. Both worlds engage and enhance her curiosity about birds and puts her into the creative flow of life. Since first exhibiting her work in 2006, Medow has received many accolades and her work is held in many private collections. There have been numerous articles written about her work including Proof.National Geographic - An Altered Reality by Becky Harlan and Inspire Adobe Photoshop For The Birds by Alyssa Coppelman. Medow was a featured artist in the August 2017 publication of LensWork #131. In 2019, Medow had her first showing at AIPAD at Pier #94, NYC. Ten prints from her series were displayed at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago, Illinois. And, CFPA Center for Photographic Arts in Carmel exhibited Crowned Crane Calling in the November International Juried Exhibition juried by Paula Tognarelli from the Griffin Museum. In 2018, many of Medow's prints from her Envisioning Habitat An Altered Reality series were on view at the Wildling Museum in Solvang, California. Medow's image Grey Crowned Cranes won the Best Of Show award in the Altered Reality category in NANPA's Showcase 2018 along Two Snowys which received the Judges' Choice Award. Both and more were featured in NANPA's publication Expressions 2018. The jurors were George Lepp, Roy Toft and Darrel Gulin. She received both a Gold and Portfolio Awards in San Francisco Bay International Photo Show and Night Heron In Tucson was exhibited at the ACCI Gallery, in Berkeley, California, during the San Francisco Bay Month of Photography in September of 2018. The Texas Photographic Society featured Burrowing Owls at the ArtWorks Gallery in Austin, Texas and received Honorable Mention from the juror, Roy Flukinger. Six prints were featured in Currents 2017 at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans juried by Richard McCabe in conjunction with PhotoNola. Tri-Colored Heron And A Skimmer is now part of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art permanent collection. Over the years, many of her images have been displayed in galleries across the US. Medow hopes that by embracing her hyper-real bird images, her audience will also create more space for birds living on our planet and be mindful of the fragility and beauty of life itself.