Works by Jo Sandman are on exhibit at Brickbottom in Somerville. (Photo: Claire Ogden)
“Glyphs: Jo Sandman” opened at Brickbottom Gallery on Thursday. It’s a gorgeous retrospective from 1950 to 2014, when Sandman stopped actively making art, of abstract shapes used to convey meaning. After being shown throughout New England and New York at places such as the DeCordova and the Rose Art Museum, the work is finally at home in the Brickbottom studio that Sandman maintained from the early 1990s until 2022, now being used by her art dealer, Katherine French.
Nick Capasso, director of the Fitchburg Art Museum, described Sandman as one of New England’s most important artists; he wrote in a catalog that she “ranks among the Promethean figures who brought the light of modernism to Boston.” That was lit for Sandman at the legendary Black Mountain College. In 1951, she took a break from her undergraduate studies at Brandeis to work on her paintings there, overlapping with greats such as Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg.
The Sandman retrospective covers the years 1950 to 2014. (Photo: Claire Ogden)
Sandman took inspiration from all things; she was exploring different mediums constantly. Works on view in “Glyphs” range from paintings to mixed media sculpture to photograms and photography. The show presents them in a loose chronology, connected by a meticulous yet playful attention to shape.
A striking painting with bright bursts of orange represents Sandman’s early Black Mountain era. Next to that we see Sandman stray further and further from painting. In one series, she makes masterpieces from delicate folded linen. In other works, she created collages with torn or burnt paper, made drawings on heat-sensitive paper and created sculptures out of automobile radiator hoses. In her brilliant “Artifacts of Air” series, she imagined the shapes of dust motes in her studio with window caulk. Her attention to the smallest of details – and ability to conjure them from any material – is moving.
The Sandman show is on exhibit through Nov. 8. (Photo: Claire Ogden)
Photography was the final medium Sandman deployed in her practice; those works have their own room toward the show’s end. Inkjet prints of found coral are displayed next to the coral itself. X-ray images of the human body are haunting reminders of mortality. Her “Serpent Glyph” series shows photograms of snake skin, twisted into inscrutable shapes that feel loaded with some mysterious meaning. A favorite is “Light Memory,” a silver gelatin print that is dark with unexpected blotches of light. Like the rest of Sandman’s work, it is understated but beautiful. It has the feeling of revisiting one’s childhood home: Nothing has changed, but you have – and it somehow feels both familiar and completely new.
“Glyphs: Jo Sandman” is at the Brickbottom Artists Building, 1 Fitchburg St., Inner Belt, Somerville, through Nov. 8.
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