It is a pleasure to welcome Katherine French, Curator of the Sandman Legacy Project, to the Griffin Museum for an afternoon presentation on the works of Jo Sandman. Ms. French will speak about the decades long career and innovative creativity of Sandman, and the works on display in the exhibition, A Life in Art. Upon retirement as Director Emerita from the Danforth Art Museum in Framingham, MA, Katherine French moved to northern Vermont and is now curator for the Sandman Legacy Project helping to place work by the artist Jo Sandman in the permanent collection of museums across the country. Recipient of awards for curatorial excellence from the New England chapter of the International Association of Art Critics, she was named Best Curator of Locally Made Art at the Boston Art Awards and also now works as an independent curator to create exhibitions for Catamount Arts, the Vermont Arts Council and numerous others. 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.
Where Winchester Comes Together