Jas McDaniel
Four years ago, Jo Jensen was going through a messy divorce. She was angry at her ex and lonely in the home they’d shared for a quarter century.
“It was like, oh man, I can’t stay home here all alone,” she remembers. “I gotta get out.”
So Jensen, a 17-year veteran teacher at Cherokee Heights Middle School, called up some friends.
“They said, ‘You gotta come with us to Chief’s, it’s really fun,’” Jensen says.
At Chief’s Tavern, on Cottage Grove Road, Jensen and her buddies would meet up Tuesdays after work and have a couple of drinks. Her friends were right — it was fun. And part of the fun was playing pull-tabs, those low-stakes lottery cards commonly sold at taverns around Wisconsin.
“You peel back the tabs, and under them are all these little icons,” Jensen says. “And I’m sitting there looking at these things. They almost look like fish scales. And I thought, ‘Hmmm...What could I make with these?’”
Bartenders at a couple of local establishments began setting aside the discarded cards for her, and soon Jensen had a huge stash in the little studio inside her Bay Creek neighborhood home. Her first creation was a sculpture of a big bass jumping out of a boat, chomping on a wallet with a fake $100 bill in it.
With a hot-glue gun, Jensen would fasten the pull-tabs to frames she sculpted from used cardboard boxes. She’s finished about a dozen projects over the past two years. Most include visual puns about money or gambling. There’s a 4-foot-tall dragon shaped like a dollar bill sign and a 7-foot mermaid calling to gamblers like a siren. Underneath a big-fish-eating-a-little-fish sculpture is a George Bernard Shaw quote: “In gambling the many must lose in order that the few may win.”
Jensen, 57, isn’t anti-gambling, though she’s too frugal to do it much. In her art, she likes “the idea of making something cool out of other people’s losses.”
As the youngest of eight kids growing up in Milwaukee, Jensen was the little girl forever drawing on any blank paper she could find. At her local library, her dad used to show her Charles Addams’ macabre cartoons in The New Yorker and explain the jokes.
“That’s why I am the sick person I am today,” she jokes.
She never expected to make a career in art. “You do art because you have to,” she says. “If somebody buys some stuff, that’s just the icing on the cake.”
She likes her day job, but it’s hard. She teaches health and family and consumer education to 11- to 14-year-olds (“Puberty ‘R Us,” she says).
She says art gives her solace after a tough week. “I work with a lot of kids that are coming from pretty meager places and got all sorts of troubles. Sometimes it’s hard to know how to help them.”
Her home is crowded with her twisted, funny work, much of it playing on her Catholic upbringing. There’s a portrait of “Laughing Jesus” and a sculpture of a crucified, bloody Christ scrolling through music on his iPod. She’s also painted several portraits of “The 27 Club,” rock musicians — including Jimi Hendrix and Amy Winehouse — who died at that age.
Right after her divorce, Jensen spent a lot of time pouring her pain into projects that have since stalled out in her basement.
“I’d rather spend time being whimsical and happy rather than being an angry woman, you know? That’s boring. People don’t like you. I don’t like me. This is more fun.”
Jo Jensen
Age: 57
Day job: teacher at Cherokee Heights Middle School
Website: jojensenart.com
