Jo Sandman: Folded Fabric

The artist Jo Sandman witnessed and participated in the radical experimentation that shaped the history of Post-War and contemporary art. A student of both Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell, she studied 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, wall pieces, and installation works, all of which were exhibited widely and are now in the permanent collections of many museums.

Over the course of a long career, she exhibited actively and in 2022 was the subject of a career retrospective, “Jo Sandman: Traces,” at the Black Mountain College Museum in Asheville, North Carolina and the exhibition “Helen Frankenthaler and Jo Sandman/Without Limits” at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine. In 2023, she had an exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her current exhibition at the Knoxville Museum of Art will be on view until November 10, 2024, and “Jo Sandman: A Life in Art” opens November 1 at the Griffin Museum of Photography. In addition to numerous artist residencies and teaching fellowships, she taught at Wellesley College and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Significant awards she has received include fellowships from the Massachusetts Arts Council and the Bunting Institute at Harvard, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation.

In the early 1970s after many years of painting in an abstract manner, Sandman put down her paint brushes and began experimenting with her unused supply of painter’s linen. Instead of stretching the fabric, she began by using a handheld iron to crease the material, and soon after negotiated with a dry-cleaning plant to use their industrial press. Her sharply folded linen grids were of immediate interest in an era of such “minimalist” artists as Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, and Dorothea Rockburne. When Sandman became aware that she and Rockburne were working in similar ways, she experienced momentary panic. The two women were nearly the same age and although both had attended Black Mountain in the early 1950s, their paths never crossed (Rockburne had been absent the summer Sandman was in residence), yet Sandman feared comparisons would be inevitable. After Sandman read about and saw images of Rockburne’s work, she reconciled herself to this instance of multiple discovery, a phenomenon common to both science and art. What really mattered to her was how individual artists handled experimentation in their own studio.

“I keep on making art because it means repeatedly taking risks,” Sandman has said. Her large grids of fabric were pinned directly to the wall, while smaller experiments with cotton duck were framed. Walking the line between drawing and sculptural relief, these pieces touched upon conceptualism by visually conveying the process of their creation through a narrative told in raised and sunken folds. Crucially, however, it was Sandman’s firm belief that her aesthetic was more important than any conceptual ideas. She loved the sensuous feel of material and was delighted by how colors would subtly shift when light fell across a folded surface.

The works in Sandman’s exhibition at Krakow Witkin Gallery demonstrate the breadth and depth with which she created her folded works. Multi-part pieces are balanced by works consisting of single elements and the power of small works next to the larger ones displays the rigor of the artist’s practice. As the first exhibition in fifty years to be solely devoted to the fabric works, the gallery hopes to reintroduce and resituate Sandman’s work within the wider conversation of that time.