TRADITION! Curator's statement about Sandy Kaplan

Sandy Kaplan is also active in community life, both through her long-time work in development for Barnes-Jewish Hospital at Washington University Medical Center and in her second career as a sculptor. The exuberance of the men and women adorning Kaplan’s vase-like forms can certainly be read as emblematic of the artist’s zest for life, but the good times she depicts circle around the central emptiness of each vessel. The painted ceramic dancers are still, of course, but we move around them, conjuring narratives through our own motion, as if we’re swaying to the music of an imaginary fiddler. But what of those interior hollows?  The empty spaces in Kaplan’s forms are perhaps waiting to be filled, in the sense that every vase awaits its flowers, but also in the sense that we sometimes dance to keep existential emptiness at bay.  (From TRADITION! curator's statement.  Buzz Spector, curator and Dean of the College and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University)