19 Facts About Jo Hanson

Jo Hanson was an American environmental artist and activist.

Jo Hanson was known for using urban trash to create works of art.

Jo Hanson was born on August 1,1918, in Carbondale, Illinois.

Jo Hanson moved to California in 1955, first living in Marin County, before settling in San Francisco in the early 1970s where she purchased and restored Nightingale House, located on Buchanan Street to landmark status.

Jo Hanson died at her home, of cancer, on March 13,2007, in which she was remembered by SFGate as a "green activist" who used street trash in her work.

Jo Hanson's work was known for incorporating the detritus she collected while sweeping.

Jo Hanson analyzed and classified what she found as a way of documenting daily life in her district and felt that it reflected a disconnect between the consumption and production of goods and the natural world.

For six years during the 1980s Jo Hanson was a vocal member of the San Francisco Arts Commission pushing for the inclusion of underrepresented artists in the city's art collections, specifically women and people of color.

Jo Hanson played a key role in saving the murals of Coit Tower, and the restoration of the murals at Golden Gate Park's Beach Chalet.

In 1990 Jo Hanson conceived of and initiated the establishment of the artist-in-residence program at Recology.

Jo Hanson co-founded Women Eco Artists Dialog, a directory of artists and researchers working with environmental themes in 1996.

Jo Hanson offered public support and appreciation to street workers, a heightened awareness of our visual environment, and encouragement for individual and community responsibility in the maintenance of clean streets.

Magazine interviews and television news coverage alerted the San Francisco audience to these intentions, certainly, and to one other: consistently identifying herself with her profession, Jo Hanson created a work linking social concerns with art in a directly accessible manner.

Jo Hanson remains excited by the newer artists and the new collaborative projects springing up all over.

Jo Hanson was awarded with a National Endowment for the Arts Artist's Fellowship in 1977, a Visual Arts Project Grant in 1979.

In 1992 Jo Hanson was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Northern California Women's Caucus for Art.

Jo Hanson compiled volumes of urban detritus that are now recognized as an artistic tour de force which raised community awareness as it chronicled rapidly changing demographics.

One of Jo Hanson's best known works is Crab Orchard Cemetery, a re-creation of her ancestral cemetery in Illinois, which opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 1974.

Jo Hanson's archives are located with several institutions including the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.