Jo Hanson's
Crab Orchard Cemetary

August 11, 2025 - January 11, 2026
Fig Garden and Duncan Galleries

The Fresno Art Museum acquired Crab Orchard Cemetery by Jo Hanson (1918-2007) in 2023. This work is comprised of 32 Styrofoam tombstones, additional rubbings, background transparencies, audio files, and supplementary material. The exhibition is a restaging of Hanson’s original 1974 installation at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and is a re-creation of a pre-Civil War cemetery near the artist’s hometown of Carbondale in rural southern Illinois. Hanson reproduced the tombstones, many of which belonged to distant family members, by first making rubbings and then transferring the images to Styrofoam using a unique silk-screening process based on light sensitive ink. She also recreated the surrounding scenery by enlarging photo negatives onto transparencies that are twelve feet long as well as recording the environmental sounds of the original cemetery to create an immersive environment for the visitor. After the original installation at the Corcoran, the exhibition traveled the U.S. in the late 1970s and 1980s. This exhibition will be the first time this work has been exhibited since 2009.

Jo Hanson was an assemblage and environmental artist and activist based in San Francisco. Born in Carbondale, Illinois in 1918, Hanson moved to California in 1955, living first in Marin County before settling in San Francisco in the early 1970s. A strong advocate of environmental art and the Feminist Art Movement, Hanson was a vocal member of the San Francisco arts community, pushing for the inclusion of underrepresented artists in the city’s art collections, specifically women and people of color. She was also a guest professor at the University of California, Berkeley; the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland; and the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. In 1992, the National Women’s Caucus for Art gave Jo Hanson a Lifetime Achievement Award. She received the National Women’s Caucus for Art Honor Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts in 1997. Jo Hanson was the Fresno Art Museum’s Council of 100 Distinguished Woman Artist for 1998. She exhibited nationally and internationally throughout her career. Jo Hanson’s legacy continues in the growing movement of artists who focus on social and environmental issues.

This exhibition was curated by FAM Curator Sarah Vargas and will re-create Hanson’s original installation which was itself a recreation of historical monuments that explore the universality of memory and death.

This exhibition is comprised of work from the Fresno Art Museum’s Permanent Collection.

Images: Jo Hanson, Selections from Crab Orchard Cemetery, circa 1973, Mixed media installation, Collection of the Fresno Art Museum