Boston Globe: For 93-year-old painter and sculptor Jo Sandman, living the life of an artist ‘my destiny’

Sandman’s career is getting a second wind as an independent curator finds new homes for her artworks

December 23, 2024
By Cate McQuaid

Originally Posted in the Boston Globe, read it here.

As a restlessly experimental painter and sculptor, Jo Sandman has worked for seven decades — a marathon.

Recently, her career been getting a second wind. Since 2018, Sandman has partnered with independent curator Katherine French, former executive director at the Danforth Art Museum, to sift through artworks stored in her Somerville studio and find homes for them in collections.

“We inventoried it, took pictures of everything,” French said. “I said, ‘I’ll do outreach to museums, but there’s no guarantee.’ I know how hard it is getting things through a collections committee.”

But the committees have been receptive. French estimates that the effort, called the Jo Sandman Legacy Project, has donated up to 2,000 works to roughly 50 museums.

“Museums have been taking 30 pieces, 40 pieces,” she said.

More than that — they’ve been mounting shows. Since 2020, Sandman has had four solo exhibitions. Another, “Jo Sandman: Skin Deep,” opens at the Portland Museum of Art in February. She has a piece on view in “Tender Loving Care, Contemporary Art from the Collection” at the Museum of Fine Arts through Jan. 12, and in the forthcoming “Better on Paper: Recent Acquisitions of Prints, Drawings, Photographs, and Books” at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College.

Where to find her: www.josandman.com

Age: 93

Originally from: Newton

Lives in: Lexington

Making a living: “I did a fair amount of teaching,” Sandman said, at Wellesley College and Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and her late husband, Robert Asher, helped support her.

Studio: Paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and materials still fill walls and storage units in Sandman’s 1,800-square-foot studio at Brickbottom Artists Building.

French pulled a tube off a shelf and opened it. “This is the paper that she was using,” she said. “I actually have to open them up and go through them because some of it’s art and some of it’s just paper.”

How she started: Sandman’s mother painted. Growing up, “there was always that promise of artmaking going on,” the artist said. “Making art was like breathing,”

At 20, she spent a summer at Black Mountain College, an avant-garde liberal arts school in North Carolina. Classmates included Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. Her experience there “made very clear that living the life of an artist was not only a possibility, but a reality,” Sandman said. “That it was my destiny.”

What she makes: What hasn’t she made? Glyphs collaged from remnants of old tarp drop cloths or written with caulk; snaking sculptures crafted from plaster-stuffed radiator hoses; drawings on paper made with wood-burning tools.

How she works: A new gesture, method, or material would often take Sandman somewhere. “I wanted to explore new territory,” she said. “I didn’t carry the burden of what I’d already done with me.” She still folds fabric and draws.

Advice for artists: Nothing about making art is sacred, Sandman said, so mix it up. “Follow your own impulses and don’t be dragged down by what other people think or what other people do in art-making,” Sandman said. “But try to be original in your own way.”