Jo Sandman is a painter and multidisciplinary artist, now aged 93, who has exhibited nationally and internationally during her long career. Sandman attended the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1951, where she studied with Robert Motherwell and Aaron Siskind, among others. At Maine’s Portland Museum of Art, Sandman’s 1998 suite of images, which make up “Skin Deep,” reveal these important early influences.
At Black Mountain, Sandman experimented with painting, collage and interdisciplinary media of all kinds, including music and dance. Teachers there at the time included faculty member and poet Charles Olson, who had traveled in Central America and brought back information on then-untranslated Mayan glyphs, a system of writing in which representational images combine with abstract symbols to form words or syllables. The concept of glyphs took hold at Black Mountain. A kind of implicit cultural bias was endemic as well — teachers and students felt free to imagine meanings and uses of the Mayan writings without deeper considerations of the advanced, millennia-old culture.
Sandman’s work transcends these 1950s ideas while retaining the concept of symbolic visual language. She uniquely uses the teachings of formal abstraction learned from her professors at Black Mountain, but her abstractions combine with organic shapes. The flat plane of the picture surface is paramount here; the graphic snake images inhabit a purely two-dimensional space. Created in mid-career, over 40 years after her seminal summer at Black Mountain, “Skin Deep” revisits and recontextualizes Sandman’s first, important artistic influences. The snakeskins are arranged into complicated, but somehow vaguely familiar shapes — perhaps an alphabet, perhaps a numbering system — a bold, unfamiliar text.