Thirty works by 95-year-old Boston artist Jo Sandman went on display at the Bruce Museum on Aug. 29, opening a new exhibition that spans seven decades of her career.

"Jo Sandman: What Remains" is on view in the Vicki Netter Fitzgerald Gallery at 1 Museum Drive. The show, curated by Jordan Hillman, assistant curator of art, runs through Sunday, Jan. 3, 2027.

The 30 pieces come from a recent gift to the museum's permanent collection. They include collages, drawings, photographs and installations made from materials most artists would throw away: discarded parchment paper, linen fabric, tape, tin foil and X-rays.

Sandman, born in 1931, trained as a painter. She studied at Black Mountain College, then with Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell in New York City, and earned her MFA from UC Berkeley in 1955, according to Living Greenwich. By the 1970s, she felt painting had "exhausted itself" as a means of expression. She stopped applying paint and turned to subtractive processes: burning, cutting, folding and scraping.

One work on view, "Light Tracing #9" (2003), started with volcanic rock and coral Sandman collected on the beaches of Papua New Guinea. She saw what she called "primitive masks" in the stone, faces worn by time and erosion. She refined those features with a drill, placed the altered rock onto gelatin silver paper and exposed it to light. The shielded area stayed white while the surrounding paper darkened to black.

The Bruce Museum's exhibition page notes that the works record Sandman's creative process while evoking ancient hieroglyphs, city plans and architectural ruins. Archaeology and anthropology, interests she first explored at Black Mountain College, have shaped her imagery throughout her career.

Sandman's work sits in permanent collections at the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, MIT and the Rhode Island School of Design, among others. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Rockefeller Foundation.

The Sandman Legacy Project, which facilitates donations of her work to public institutions, has placed pieces in more than 40 museums since 2018.

The Bruce Museum offers guided art tours on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The exhibition runs through Jan. 3, 2027.