Sandra Jensen

Hailing from Salt Lake City, Sandra Curtis Jensen Levy Rowland studied modern dance at the University of Utah, but marrying young, she felt the need to “get serious” and become “a serious science person.” Her detour into speech pathology with graduate study at the University of Washington was ultimate unsatisfying, and when she followed her husband to Houston she found that faculty spouses could take classes for free at Rice University. She took several art history courses and came to the attention of Dominique de Menil, who asked her to become her registrar and organize her collection. In 1978, she was appointed the coordinator of the Texas Project of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. Over six years, her regional office preserved some 600 record groups on microfilm, encompassing files kept by artists, museums, and galleries around the Southwest. She moved back to Salt Lake City in to be closer to her family, and ran the eclectic E Street Gallery with her husband Cruser from a historic storefront for almost ten years; their shop was reinvented in 2006 as the Jack Mormon Coffee Company. In 2020, University of North Texas Press published Jensen’s book Bob Bilyeu Camblin: An Iconoclast in Houston’s Emerging Art Scene.

Notes: Pete Gershon interviewed Sandra Jensen on September 20, 2019 at the home of her friend, Dr. Carolyn Farb.