Whitney Brooks Hansen
Whitney Brooks Hansen died peacefully in her Santa Barbara home on Garden Street, May 1, 2025. She was 88.
Born in Beverly Hills in 1936, Whitney was the middle child of five born to Hope and Robert Brooks. She and her siblings grew up on Hilltop Ranch in Carpinteria, riding horses among the lemon groves, chewing road tar, and filling sketchbooks (so the story goes). The sisters all attended Marymount School in Santa Barbara, and Whitney graduated from Scripps College in 1958 with a BA in Art History.
She had met Peter Hansen back in high school, but the two did not marry until 1959. They spent their first years in LA, were soon blessed with daughter Hope, then in 1961 moved to New York City, where Whitney’s older sister Hopie had already planted a stake in the local art scene. While Peter worked on documentaries and in television, Whitney began refining her craft as well, attending the Pratt Institute and the Arts Students League.
The family would grow. Son Brooks arrived in 1965, then Sam in ‘74. Another home was planted in Sag Harbor, and Whitney found her medium: the woodcut. Through it, she developed her signature style, a mysterious interplay of print-flatness and painterly dimension that compels the closer look–at landscape, skyscape, still-life, and street scene.
Her work appeared in a variety of platforms, including posters, children’s books, and art books. In 2016, she conceived and provided over thirty prints for an oral history of her adopted hometown, Oh, That’s Another Story: Images and Tales of Sag Harbor. Her most consistent venue, however, was the gallery show. Over five decades, Whitney’s work was featured in exhibits all over New York and Long Island, including the galleries of Elizabeth Ives Bartholet, Maxwell Davidson,The Atlantic, Goat Alley, Lizan Tops, and the Salmagundi Club.
After re-establishing roots in Santa Barbara, she added plein air painting to her quiver, this time under the influence of her younger sister, Meredith Abbott. That return to basics on the canvas somehow set her woodcuts free, and introduced her work to a new and receptive audience on the West Coast. Locally, her paintings and prints have appeared most often at the Ellen Easton Gallery in Montecito, but also the Marcia Burtt gallery, The Faulkner, Palm Loft, the Ventura County Museum of History and Art, and the Westmont College Art Gallery. She was a longtime member of the Oak Group, and her work can be found in various private and public collections, including that of John Steinbeck, Bowdoin College, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
As constant and singular a road as Whitney traveled artistically, her greatest gift was surely the quality of her presence and companionship. Aside from painting with her sisters, she loved nothing more than travel–usually with family, and especially in France. She was a steady reader, a gourmet chef, a reliable baker of cookies and assembler of gingerbread houses–for children inside the family and out. And it is that, in fact–the equal care and attention she paid to every task, to every moment, and every person who entered her sphere–that helps explain her lasting impact. Whitney is survived by her three children, six grandchildren, and two more great-grandchildren, as well as siblings Meredith, Blue, and Bobby, but she will be remembered by everyone who knew her as a kind of pillar, and a deeply comforting reminder of the power that flows from authenticity, humility, humor, discernment, and unwavering gentle kindness.
