November 1 – December 8, 2024
Reception for the Artist – November 16th – 6 to 8pm
Katherine French Presents a Life in Art – Saturday December 7th – 2.30 to 4pm
The Griffin is thrilled to showcase the work of creative artist Jo Sandman. The museum is proud to hold in its collection objects that span the breadth and depth of Sandman’s creativity. Her exploration of craft, utilizing photography as a base layer expands our vision of humanity, our way of seeing. In the 1990s, Sandman turned her attention to photography, grounding her images in the human figure, mortality, and the tensions between the material and the spiritual. Sandman’s photographic work is characteristically experimental—she employs both antique 19th-century photographic processes alongside contemporary medical and digital imaging techniques to create her beautiful, poetic, and disquieting images.
About Jo Sandman –
Jo Sandman was not only a witness to the historically important experimentation that shaped mid to late 20th century art, but also an active participant . 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, which were exhibited widely and are now in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the de Young Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco, and many others. In addition to numerous artist residencies and teaching fellowships, she taught at Wellesley College and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. 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 exhibited widely and in 2022 was featured in a career retrospective Jo Sandman: Traces at the Black Mountain College Museum in Asheville, NC and the exhibition Helen Frankenthaler and Jo Sandman/Without Limits at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, ME.