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500 REASONS TO PRESERVE THE EARTH. 1996
Installation, Civic Center, Dublin, CA. 10' x 6.5' x 81".
WALKING MAN. 1990.
Found metal from the street. 17" x 9" x 2.5".
BIG RED. 1989.
Street crushed metals, windshield glass. 20" x 10" x 2".
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Artist Statement
I am an eco-environmental artist, lecturer, writer, occasional curator, participant in panels, symposia and conferences, projects and events. My work originated from the environmental and social implications of urban street trash, which I have cleaned up and documented in my windy block of San Francisco since 1970. Part-time living in the Russian River area now adds flood, watershed and eco-restoration to the issues of my work.
My early work generated mutually supportive relationships with the street cleaning department and other City services, as well as the interest of my neighbors. From six years of service as a San Francisco Arts Commissioner, I developed specialized expertise that enabled me to propose and advise an Artist-in-Residence program in the disposal company, Sanitary Fill Co., part of Norcal Waste Systems, Inc. The program opened in 1990 with instant success as educational outreach in behalf of conservation and recycling. Its effectiveness increases year by year. It is an excellent residency for artists.
I use street materials for collage, assemblage, sculpture and installations, and flood material similarly. Exhibition and installation work enlarge my network and opportunities to speak, teach, write, etc. about environment. I like being part of an alternative mainstream of art committed to social responsibility in a world that teeters between disaster and transformation.
OBITUARY
Jo Hanson, a pioneering spirit in both environmental and feminist activist art movements, died Tuesday March 13, 2007 at her home in San Francisco. The SF Museum of Modern Art, Oakland Museum of California, Fresno Museum, and Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC are among the institutions that exhibited her innovative work that transformed urban waste into meaningful art.
Hanson came to prominence early in the 1970’s, soon after she moved into a deteriorated but stately Victorian on Buchanan Street. Once she had resuscitated the house into a landmark, she tackled its windy, litter-strewn sidewalk. Her personal act of sweeping one sidewalk grew into a celebrated public art practice and citywide anti-litter campaign. Her compiled volumes of urban detritus are recognized as an artistic political tour de force that raised community awareness as it chronicled rapidly changing demographics.
Not content to be a cloistered artist, Hanson organized city-wide street sweepings, children’s anti-litter art campaigns for City Hall, and led a famous bus tour of San Francisco street dumping sites—all extensions of her conceptual real-life artworks. Hanson’s community-inclusive strategies set precedents in public eco-art, created models for younger artists, and gave poor neighborhoods visual access to City Hall.
Her first nationally touring solo exhibition was an inventive mix of sculpture, printmaking, photography and sound, “The Crab Orchard Cemetery,” based on her Southern Illinois ancestral graveyard. One writer lauded the1974 installation as exploring roots before Alex Haley and death before the Kubler-Ross book.
A vocal SF Arts Commissioner for six years in the 1980’s, Hanson was known for championing the inclusion of deserving underrepresented women and artists of color in the City’s art collections. She was the driving force behind saving Lucien Labaudt’s murals at the Beach Chalet. She was instrumental in the Art Commission’s restoring the Coit Tower murals and acquiring public art for San Francisco International Airport.
In the late 1980’s Hanson convinced NORCAL Sanitary Waste recycling and disposal company to develop an artist-in-residency program, offering a studio and stipend for emerging and well-known artists to create artwork from the waste stream to raise public awareness. Nationally recognized and awarded, the AIR program has become hugely successful, benefiting 100+ artists and the San Francisco public. Each year more than 2500 SF school children visit the AIR studio and tour its reclamation sculpture garden.
Hanson initiated and collaborated on myriad ecoart exhibits, articles, books, lectures and programs. She instituted, and was awarded for, ecoart programming at Bioneers--the annual international gathering of ecological innovators in Marin County. She was proud of co-founding in 1996 WEAD—the Women Environmental Artists Directory, a journal, website and international network connecting and documenting the artwork of more than 200 women ecoartists, that also produces yearly exhibits and outreach events.
Recipient of both a National Endowment for the Arts artist’s fellowship (1977) and visual arts project grant (1979), Hanson received the 1997 Distinguished Woman Artist Award from the Fresno Art Museum Council of 100. In 1992 the Northern California Regional Women’s Caucus honored her for Lifetime Achievement for Art. In 1997 the National Women’s Caucus for Art honored her Outstanding Achievement in Visual Arts. Her work is in many public and private collections.
Hanson held two masters’ degrees, one in education from the University of Illinois, and reflecting her career change in the 1960’s, another in art from San Francisco State.
Jo Hanson is survived and remembered by friends and family, including her children, Leni Reeves of Auberry CA and Zack Schlesinger of Santa Cruz, and her grandchildren Ilya Reeves, Aaron Reeves of San Francisco and Jillian Schlesinger of NYC.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Birth: August 1, 1918. Death: March 13, 2007. Cause of death: Cancer. Burial: March 17, 2007, in Bolinas, CA.
Born in Carbondale, Illinois, she was a CA resident since 1955, living first in Marin County, and since 1970 in San Francisco in her landmark house called the “Nightengale” house, 201 Buchanan St.
In the 1990’s she had a small second home in Monte Rio, CA, along a creek flowing into the Russian River. Active in Sonoma County environmental issues, she often hosted activist meetings at a long wooden communal table under the redwoods. The flooding river inspired an exhibited body of work called “Gaia Does the Laundry” (1995-96).
Selection of Solo Exhibits: SFMuseum of Modern Art, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Selection of public collections: Cornell University, Mills College, Fresno Art Museum, SF Arts Commission, SFMOMA, Knoxville (TN) Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of Art.
CONTACTS: Susan Leibovitz Steinman, email: SLSteinman@aol.com, phone: 510-549-3775.
Hanson’s co WEAD—Women’s Environmental Art Directory, et al.WEAD website: www.weadartists.org.
Zack Schlesinger (son), email: zack@spectrum.ucsc.edu.
Leni Reeves (daughter), phone 559-855-4511.
More work and information about environmental artist Hanson can be found at
http://www.weadartists.org/hanson
AND http://www.varoregistry.com/hanson/index.html
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