Educator, artist, and co-founder of a feminist gallery. Fund at The Trust continues her charitable legacy in the arts.
Sandra S. Branch (1936-2013)
It was 1979, and Sandra Branch was washing clothes at a laundromat on Leonard Street when she saw the flyer on a bulletin board. A new school, called the New York Feminist Art Institute (NYFAI), was offering a course for women artists called “Visual Diaries,” where they would draw and paint images that arose from consciousness-raising discussions and their personal lives. She immediately signed up.
“I was an artist. I had a loft on Canal Street and … I might have been teaching at The Little Red School House at the time,” she said in a 2007 oral history interview. “All my jobs were in art. I was just interested in meeting other women in the artists’ community.”
The Feminist Art Institute was founded in 1979 by women artists, educators, and professionals, and it offered workshops and classes, performances, and exhibitions that contributed to the political and cultural importance of the women’s movement in the 1980s.
In the “Visual Diaries” classes, the artists would decide as a group on a question or theme, “and then we’d sit silently and do a drawing and then we’d talk about it afterwards,” Sandra said in the interview.
“The ‘Visual Diaries’ class made you think about your art as part of you and not being separate from you,” Sandra said. Her art journals are part of the Miriam Schapiro Archives on Women Artists at Rutgers University.
Sandra S. Branch was born July 25, 1936, to Capt. Goodman S. Branch and Winnifred Sprague Branch in Sparta, Wisconsin, not far from Fort McCoy, where her father was stationed. She had one sister, Winnifred Grace, who was two years younger.
Her father, an Army officer, was reassigned frequently, and the family moved with him. When Sandra was three, they lived in Manistee, Michigan. In the late 1940s, they moved to Oahu, then to Louisiana and, in March 1952, Col. Branch accepted a two-year assignment as military attaché to Paraguay. His final post was advisor to the Massachusetts National Guard in Boston.
Sandra graduated from Belmont High School in Massachusetts in 1955. Her yearbook entry said she aspired to be a fashion illustrator. As a member of the school’s Spanish Club, Sandra regaled her friends with stories about teenage customs in Paraguay.
She graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1962, her sister, Winni Paskerian, said. In the mid-1960s, Sandra parked her car at Winni’s house just outside Boston and spent a year touring Europe.
After a brief marriage to the photographer Jack Yager, Sandra moved to New York, where she taught art to middle-school students for several years at The Little Red School House, a progressive school in Greenwich Village. In the late 1970s, she began designing textiles for Payne Fabrics and Greef Fabric in the city’s Garment District.
In June 1984, Sandra and a handful of other artists brought the idea of a cooperative women’s art gallery to NYFAI, and the Ceres Gallery was conceived. Darla Bjork, another of the founders, bought a building at 91 Franklin Street in SoHo, and the dues-paying members put up walls, installed lights, painted, cleaned windows, and washed floors. The gallery opened in September 1984, and the art institute’s offices were on the second floor.
Large, salon-style shows, panel discussions, feminist film festivals, and joint exhibitions were held annually. NYFAI closed in 1990, and the Ceres Gallery moved first to SoHo and later to Chelsea.
“Ceres became her life,” Sandra’s sister Winni said. “We went to a number of her exhibitions there, and we loved visiting her fourth-floor walkup loft on Canal Street.”
In the 2007 interview, Sandra Branch explained how NYFAI and her involvement in the Ceres Gallery helped her and hundreds of other women artists.
“It certainly was instrumental in helping me find a place in the art world,” Sandra said. “If it hadn’t been for NYFAI, there wouldn’t have been Ceres, and it if hadn’t been for Ceres … I wouldn’t have met these women, and I wouldn’t have exhibited there. The most important thing is it was a community.”
Sandra was living in an apartment on Central Park West when she died in 2013. She was 86.
Her fund, established in 2021 in The New York Community Trust, has helped arts programs at nonprofits such as Cool Culture, Opening Act, and Studio in a School.