Even though Sandi Slone has often worked with oversized brushes — an early series of abstract paintings made with large brooms established her reputation as a young painter — she long has had a predilection for intimate gestures and unexpected incidents that signal visual metaphors for everything from the physicality of color that impacts the sensuality of landscape memory and the body — to the current state of our fraught planet. While Slone does not limit herself to any one technique or style there has always been a sense of calligraphic hand and muscular touch that expands the language of contemporary abstraction as much as her sweeping swaths of color and transparent pours do. "I still think abstract painting is a world unto itself, a parallel universe infinitely unknown—a representation of its complexity— not unlike the beauty of music, mathematics and nature’s material spirit.”
Slone’s first solo exhibitions in New York were represented by Acquavella Galleries in the 1970s and ‘80s. Her paintings have since been the subject of over 40 solo exhibitions internationally. They are held in many permanent museum collections here and abroad that include the Museum of Modern Art, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC; The Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona SP; Katzen Art Center, American University Museum, Washington, DC; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University MA; Alberta Art Museum, Edmonton Canada; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College NH ; DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, MA; Etherington Arts Centre, Queen’s University, Ontario; International Artists Museum Lodz, Poland; New Hall Art Collection, Cambridge University, UK; the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH; Butler Institute of American Art, Ohio; the Frost Art Museum, Florida International Univ; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK; Harvard University, Cambridge MA; the Davis Museum of Art, Wellesley College; the De Menil Family Trust, Paris—among many other private, corporate and public collections.
Recent gallery and museum exhibitions include “Five Propositions” Museum of Fine Arts Boston (Oct 2019-May 2020); “11 Women of Sprit”, Zürcher Gallery NYC (2020); “Summertime”, Tibor deNagy Gallery NYC (2018); “Expanding Abstraction, DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA (2018); Sargent’s Daughters Gallery NYC; Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland OR; Sideshow Gallery NYC; Fiterman Art Center CUNY NYC; George and Jôrgen gallery, London UK; Galerie Forum, Berlin; Pink Gallery, Seoul, Korea; “MULTILAYER Vision”, Mörgner Museum, Soëst Germany (Oct 2020—June 2021) traveling in Europe; “Material/Immaterial” Sandi Slone and Joanna Borkowska, Kosciuszko Foundation, NYC, Sept 6 - Oct , 2021, Curator Lilly Wei; Review: The Brooklyn Rail, Robert C Morgan, Oct, 2021 ; Caldwell Gallery, Object Matters, Oct 6 -Dec 20, Hudson NY, 2023
Slone’s solo exhibitions and paintings have been reviewed extensively, including the New York Times; The Boston Globe; The Washington Post; Arts Magazine; Artforum; Art In America; ARTnews, ARTnet; Flash Art; Architectural Digest; The London Guardian; Art New England; The Hudson Review; Partisan Review; ARTcritical; Interview Magazine; El Païs; Art International; The Brooklyn Rail, October 2021, online and in print.
Sandi Slone is Professor Emerita of painting at School of Museum of Fine Arts /Tufts University, Boston. She has served as faculty in Harvard University’s department of Visual and Environmental Studies, and in the MFA program, School of Visual Arts NYC, among others. Slone is a Founding Board Member of Art Omi International Artists Residency, Ghent, NY. Born in Boston, she has a BA in Art History from Wellesley College and a 5th year diploma from School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Slone has received a prestigious Ford Foundation research/traveling Fellowship; she was awarded travel-research grants from the Clarissa Bartlett foundation, and several residencies from the Triangle Arts Association, among other honors, including a Santa Fe Art Institute award and a nomination for American Institute of Arts and Letters.
Sandi Slone has lived and worked in downtown Manhattan since 1985.