Jo Sandman b. 1931

  •  In the early 1970s, after years of working with abstract painting, Jo Sandman made a dramatic shift away from traditional brushes, turning instead to her collection of painter’s linen. She experimented with pressing and creasing the material, initially using a handheld iron. The folds, their density, their frequency, and their pattern tell a narrative of the piece’s development, with a monochromatic visual cadence. 
     
    A student of both Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell, she was in residence at Black Mountain College with Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly and later worked for Walter Gropius. Trained as a painter, she went on to create innovative drawings, photography, experimental sculpture and installation works.
  • Exhibitions
  • Jo Sandman's drawings, photography, experimental sculpture and installation works, have been exhibited widely and are now in permanent museum collections, including that of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and numerous others. Significant awards include fellowships from the Massachusetts Arts Council and the Bunting Institute at Harvard, as well as grants from the NEA and the Rockefeller Foundation. Over the course of a long career, she has exhibited widely and was featured in the 2022 retrospective Jo Sandman: Traces at the Black Mountain College Museum in Asheville, NC; in a two person exhibition Helen Frankenthaler and Jo Sandman/Without Limits at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, ME; a solo exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, MA in 2023/24; and most recently a solo exhibition at Krakow Witkin Gallery in 2024.
  • Works