Jane Armstrong

Jane Botsford Armstrong was born in Buffalo in 1921 and was adopted and raised by Mr. and Mrs. Samuel B. Botsford.

She graduated in 1939 from the Buffalo Seminary, which owns examples of her sculpture. At the commencement ceremony of this prestigious school, the headmistress of the school compared each student to a particular flower in her garden. When Jane’s name came up last, she referred to her as “a flower on the edge of the garden leaning out.”

Armstrong briefly attended Middlebury College, but eventually transferred to Pratt Institute. She spent several years following her studies teaching art and music in the Northeast Kingdom in Vermont.

She was then hired by the Rutland Herald in Vermont as a reporter and moved to Burlington, Vermont to work for The Burlington Free Press. This led her to work for the Journal of Commerce and McGraw Hill’s third largest magazine, Chemical Week. As a reporter, interviewing business executives and reporting new developments, Armstrong traveled to Italy, Germany and England.

In 1960 she wed Dr. Robert T. Armstrong in Acapulco, Mexico.  

In her forties, Armstrong enrolled in the Art Students League of New York in 1964 and studied under Jose de Creeft and John Hovannes.  She is particularly known for her carved marble sculptures, often animals, and occasionally non-objective abstractions.  The Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries represented her work in the 1970s. The artist’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and in Europe and Russia. In 1985, the Burchfield Art Center presented a solo exhibition of Armstrong’s work, Homage to Stone that featured her “freeform” Stone Poems and representational works. Of all her sculpture awards, Jane was most proud that in 2004, The National Sculpture Society honored her with a gold medal for her “entire body of work.”

Jane Armstrong passed away on November 1st, 2012.