Sabo, Betty

Betty Jean Sabo was one of Albuquerque’s most famous contemporary artists. She was also a student of Carl Von Hassler, probably in the early years of her career. She was best known as a painter until later in her career at which time she switched her modality to bronze sculpture.

She studied art at University of New Mexico in the late 1940s and was a renowned painter before she began to create the signature bronzes in her mid-60s. The Albuquerque Museum commissioned one of her first bronze pieces; the 1995 bronze “Julia Resting,” of a woman seated on a bench outside the museum’s front doors. She also sculpted the Albuquerque Botanical Garden work featuring Clyde and Carrie Tingley, neighbors of Sabo’s when she was a child. Clyde Tingley was an early Governor of New Mexico.

Paintings by Betty Jean Sabo (1928-2016) are relatively rare as those who knew her when she was a painter have tended to have kept those they purchased. It has been several years since she painted, so there are no recent paintings for collectors to purchase.

Episode:
Betty Sabo, Peter Asher, EMPAC