Taking a leave of absence from the New York City public schools, Jo left in late 1918 only to return in January 1919, ill with bronchitis.

This was in part because "Jo poured her considerable energies into tending and nurturing her husband's work, handling loan requests and needling him into painting.

"[10] She participated in a few group exhibitions (the biggest was organized by Herman Gulack in 1958 at the Greenwich Gallery),[11] and she won the Huntington Hartford Foundation fellowship in 1957.

[13] Colleary says Jo was an "uneven" artist, but in general she thinks the work is good: "I said to myself, 'I will not resurrect this woman solely on the basis of the fact that Edward Hopper was her husband'.

[14] Additional works by Josephine Nivison Hopper have continued to surface, as reported by Elizabeth Thompson Colleary.

An exhibition of these works, "Edward and Josephine Hopper from the Permanent Collection: drawings, diaries, letters, watercolors," opened in August 2017.

[28] In The Lonely City Olivia Laing discusses Jo's career and how it floundered because Edward was "profoundly opposed to its existence.

Edward didn't just fail to support Jo's painting, but rather worked actively to discourage it, mocking and denigrating the few things she did manage to produce".

In ledger books, now in the archives of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Jo maintained inventories of the Hoppers' works, Edward's and her own.

She wrote the descriptions that accompanied Edward's pen-and-ink sketches of paintings that were turned over to the Rehn Galleries, and she recorded purchases by date, buyer, price, and commission.

[31] Jo's sketchbook—including the notes, rough drawings, and scribbled maps that she made from the passenger seat as Edward drove their Buick—documents the couple's summer driving trips in New England.

[32] Together with Jo's prolific output of diary entries and letters, these materials provide "A Window into the World of Edward and Josephine Hopper," to quote J. Anton Schiffenhaus.