biography

Jos Sances was born John Joseph Sances in Boston on August 18, 1952. After a failed career as a military strategist during the Vietnam conflict and an undesirable discharge under honorable conditions, Mr. Sances intermittently, as finances allowed, attended Montserrat School of Visual Art in Beverly, Massachusetts (now Montserrat College of Art). Jos arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1976. For over the past 30 years he has made his living as an Designer/Printmaker/Muralist.

Jos is founder and the art director of Alliance Graphics, begun in 1989 it has grown into a successful, union screenprint and design shop. Over the years Jos has designed and printed thousands of posters and t-shirts for hundreds of progressive causes, while at the same time maintaining a steady output of art which address issues and ideas which concern him. He is an expert at computer design and its application to screenprint. Before Alliance Graphics, he co-founded Mission Grafica at the Mission Cultural Center in 1980 and worked there until1988. Jos has painted murals at the Oakland Coliseum and has recently completed tile mural commissions at the new Juvenile Justice Center in San Leandro, CA; AMTRAK/BART Station, Richmond,CA and the Sixteenth Street BART station in San Francisco. He has been commissioned to do a mural at the new Castro Valley library in 2008. Mr Sances currently serves as an Art Commissioner for the City of Berkeley.

Jos finds much satisfaction in producing his own images, primarily in tile and mixed media and has an exhibition record which spans more than a decade with solo exhibitions at the Alternative Museum in New York City, the D. King Gallery, Berkeley and the Fetterly Gallery at the Vallejo Art Center. Sances has also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.C. (Committed to Print), Palo Alto Cultural Center, (Three Decades in Bay Area Print Making), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, (Labyrinth).

Email, be polite jos@unionbug.com