By: Alumni Profile: Johanna Jordan
Publication: University of the Arts: Edge Magazine, Spring 2009
For Johanna Jordan, creating art isn’t a choice: she calls it “an urge that’s innate.” For the better part of the last seven decades, the 1941 graduate has been compelled to answer that call – and has done so in dramatic fashion.
Thirty-foot-tall steel abstract sculptures, in public setting and private collections on two continents, tower as testament to Jordan’s creative vision. And the 89-year-old Santa Monica, California, artist has no intention of putting down her welding torch and hammer anytime soon.
“This urge has been with me all my life,” she says. “I’m never happier than when I’m working. I’ve been drawing since I could hold a pencil, and it really started when I went to school at the Philadelphia College of Art,” one of the university’s predecessor institutions. “Miss Sweeney, my mentor there, made an impact on me that has lasted my entire life. She strengthened my faith in myself. She even gave me a plaster cast of della Robbia’s ‘Dancing Boys’ that she brought back from Italy. I hung it in my studio in 1938, and it’s still there today. Every time I look at it I feel her belief in me.”
Jordan began her college career majoring in illustration, but shifted to Advertising Design, and after graduating, took a job at an ad agency in New York. The work was exciting, but she disliked the city and moved back to Philadelphia, where she met and married her late husband, William Jordan, a self-taught research chemist. After their two sons were born, the family moved to California.
“I kept up my painting while raising my sons, but sculpting was what was really satisfying,” Jordan says. “I went further and further with it, and ended up working with geometrics abstract forms, which I’m still working with today.”
She initially designed a smaller piece for her home that led to commissions for larger sculptures. “One commission was a 30-foot-tall piece for a company in North Carolina. I had to travel 10,000 miles over the course of a year to supervise its fabrication because of faulty workmanship, then it took 11 hours to install. I wish they had frequent flyer miles back then!”
Since then, her works have become part of public and private collections in the United States and Europe, and have also been featured as background in the Warner Brothers’ films “Mame,” “Terminal Man” and “La Femme Nikita.” She continues to work in her shop every day, cutting, welding and bending metals to fit her designs. And that wall plaque continues to inspire her.
“College was a vibrant and exciting place for me,” she says, “and it set the stage for everything I’ve done since then.”
Her advice to current students is simple. “So often we’re deterred by events in our lives. Just keep at it. Enjoy what you’re doing and see what happens.”