Sande Webster, gallery owner and early champion of Black artists, has died at 89

Sande Webster, whose gallery played a major role in the renaissance of Philadelphia’s visual arts over the past half century, and served as an important hub for the city’s Black artists, died Sunday.

She was 89 and had been increasingly frail, said her husband, the painter James Brantley.

“She just passed away in the middle of the night,” Brantley said Monday. “I came down and I looked over and she was gone.”

Ms. Webster’s gallery at 2006 Walnut St. closed in 2011 in the wake of the Great Recession. But she remained a fixture on the city’s art scene, attending openings and other events until the pandemic shut most of it down.

A lifelong Philadelphia resident, Sande Webster studied physics and Spanish at Temple University — not art. But she fondly remembered trips to the Rittenhouse Square art fair when she was a little girl, and she bought art throughout her life. She liked to say “my interest in art happened without my knowing it was happening.”

Brantley, a painter and graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Ms. Webster had been together for 37 years.

In the late 1960s, Sande Webster and three friends started a gallery, Wallnuts, on Locust Street. She had a particular interest in Black artists and became instrumental in the formation of Recherché, a small collective of Black artists who banded together in the hope of greater visibility and to exchange ideas.

Ms. Webster, a white woman, threw herself into the effort. Not only did she support the artists of Recherché, but her gallery showed a number of Black artists outside of the group.

“I hear you have Black artists in your gallery,” one prominent dealer said to her early on, she liked to recall. Ms. Webster enthusiastically acknowledged the diversity of her artists to the dealer.

“Well, don’t you know you can’t do that?” the dealer admonished, Ms. Webster said in an interview in We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s-1970s, published by Woodmere Art Museum. “If Black people come, white people never come,” the dealer continued.

Needless to say, Ms. Webster proved that prediction wrong as she eventually worked her way to a million dollars in annual sales — all while consistently showing artists of color.

“Sande is somebody who moved the needle on the arts in Philadelphia by showing Black artists before other galleries,” said William Valerio, chief executive and director of the Woodmere . Ms. Webster’s gallery gave “a platform to artists who were otherwise excluded,” he said. She “embraced artists who were otherwise not given a chance” — a situation “that still exists to this day” despite her efforts, he said.

“Since the 1980s, she’s really been an institution in the Philadelphia art world, in the commercial art world, because she amplified artists who had strong voices but weren’t being heard,” said Susanna Gold, an art historian, independent curator, and author of The Unfinished Exhibition: Visualizing Myth, Memory, and the Shadow of the Civil War in Centennial America. “A number of artists that she represented were Black artists. She was an advocate for them at a time when they didn’t have as many advocates as they should have. ”

Ms. Webster wanted to make sure her gallery defied definitions.

“She said, ‘Well, I represent good artists,’” Gold said. “She represented a number of artists of all different heritages but insisted on not categorizing them. She just wanted them to be recognized as interesting artists, as talented artists, and as artists that deserve to be seen. She made that happen in her gallery spaces and with collectors and collections.”

That said, Sande Webster Gallery represented, at different times, a who’s who of Black artists in Philadelphia — from Syd Carpenter, Moe Brooker, and Barkley Hendricks to Sam Gilliam, Charles Searles, and Richard Watson. Brooker, who was represented by the Webster Gallery for more than 20 years, said that before Sande Webster, “no galleries in the city were willing to show African American artists, period.”

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Brooker said in an interview a few years ago, that the Webster gallery “opened the door” for Black artists. He was involved in Recherché, and died in January of this year.

In fact, it was an exhibition of Recherché's work at Sande Webster’s gallery in 1985 that attracted the attention of Brantley.

“So I go into the gallery and Sande is there. I’m looking around and she comes up to me and she says, as only she could, ‘I know you; you’re James Brantley,’” Brantley recalled. “And me, being as arrogant as a young man could be, I said, ‘Oh, really? Thank you. I don’t think you know me.’ And she said, ‘Yes, I do. Your work was at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and you exhibited your work there in your third year.’ And she described the paintings.”

As Brantley got involved with Recherché, Sande Webster Gallery eventually showed his work in exhibitions all over the world — from Europe to Cuba and other countries in Latin America.

“What a rare, rare individual,” Brantley said of his wife. “An icon.”

In addition to Brantley, Ms. Webster is survived by two daughters, Mallory Lutz and Stephaine Phelan; a stepdaughter, Kelcey Liverpool; and four grandchildren. She was predeceased by a son.

Plans for a memorial service were still being formulated on Monday.