Jann Haworth

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Jann Haworth is an American artist and sculptor. She was born in 1942 and raised in Hollywood. She learned to sew at an early age from her mother, Miriam Haworth, a distinguished ceramist, print-maker and painter, and it is this skill, together with her inside experience of film-making, that gives her work its unique character.

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[edit] Early career

In 1961, after two years at UCLA, she traveled to England, where she studied at the Courtauld Institute and the Slade.

At the latter she evolved an approach to making art that was at odds with [its] traditions of muscular draughtsmanship…first making sewn and stuffed soft sculptures of still life items like flowers and doughnuts, quickly progressing to her iconic Old Lady 1 (1962), a life-sized figure…structured over a wooden chair which served as the sculpture's armature

—Christopher Finch, Catalogue for Mayor Gallery show, 2006
Jann Haworth's Old Lady,1962
Jann Haworth's Old Lady,1962

She first exhibited at the 1963 ICA 'Four Young Artists' show, in London. These early cloth sculptures predate the work of Claes Oldenburg.

The works she made over the next five or so years, independently of the 'soft sculptures' being created during the same period by Claes Oldenburg in New York, were highly personal and very specifically rooted in the circumstances of her background and in her experience as a young American woman. References abound not only to fast foods and newspapers, but also to her native Hollywood (where her father was an Oscar-winning production designer), for example in the deliciously improbable happy family of Mae West, Shirley Temple and W.C. Fields of 1967.

—Marco Livingstone, Catalogue for the Mayor Gallery show, 2006

[edit] London Pop Art movement and Sergeant Pepper

Jann Haworth became a leading member of the British Pop Art Movement in the 1960s, and almost its only female member.[1][2] She mounted solo exhibitions at the Robert Fraser Gallery ('66 and '69), Gallerie 20 in Amsterdam ('66), Studio Marconi in Milan ('68), and Sidney Janis in New York ('71). In 1967 she co-designed the iconic Sgt. Pepper LP cover for the Beatles with her then-husband, Peter Blake. In the '70s she and Blake were members of the group of artists known as the Brotherhood of Ruralists.[3] In 1979 she founded and ran The Looking Glass School near Bath, Somerset, an arts and crafts primary and middle school.

[edit] Looking Glass School and book illustration

In 1979 she separated from Blake and commenced living with her present husband, the writer Richard Severy. During the subsequent two decades her artistic career took second place to her commitment to raising a young family (2 daughters, 3 stepdaughters, and a son), but she still found time to illustrate (as Karen Haworth) six of Severy's books (Mystery Pig, 1983, Julia MacRae Books, London; Unicorn Trap 1984, Julia Macrae Books, London; Rat's Castle, 1985, Julia MacRae Books, London; High Jinks, 1986, Julia MacRae Books, London; Burners and Breakers, 1987, Dragon Books, Collins Publishing Group, London, and Sea Change 1987, Dragon Books, Collins Publishing Group, London). She also created five covers for the Methuen Arden Shakespeare edition of 1981 (Richard III, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Henry the Fifth, and Coriolanus), and mounted two solo shows at Gimpel Fils Gallery, London ('93 and '95). She also continued as head of the Looking Glass School and authored three 'How to' art books for children: Paint (1993, Merehurst), Collage (1994, Merehurst), and Painting and Sticking (with Miriam Haworth, 1995, Merehurst)

[edit] Return to America and new work

In 1997 she was granted a special Robert Fraser award by the Churchill Fellowship to study American quilt making and returned to America, to live at Sundance, Utah, where she founded the Art Shack Studios and Glass Recycling Works, and co-founded the Sundance Mountain Charter School (now the Soldier Hollow Charter School). Since then, she has re-established her career with a solo show at the Mayor Gallery, London ('06), and forthcoming solo exhibitions at the Galerie du Centre, Paris ('08), Salt Lake City Library Gallery ('08), and 'Women in Pop – Beyond the Surface', Philadelphia 2010, (University of the Arts: 2007-05-17). She has also been represented in important recent Pop Art group shows: Pop Art UK, Galeria Civica di Modena, Italy (2004); Art and the '60s, Tate Britain (2004); British Pop, Museo del Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Spain, (2005); Pop Art and Politics in the Sixties Wolverhampton, England (2007), and 'This is Pop' International Pop Art 1956-1968, Rome (2007).

[edit] Sergeant Pepper mural

In 2004 she conceived and co-created SLC PEPPER, a 50 x 30 foot mural in Salt Lake City, Utah, representing an updated version of the Sgt. Pepper record cover with stencil graffiti heads of over 75 new 'heroes', correcting the gender and ethnic biases of the original. This was a collaborative project involving over 30 artists.[4]

For this Mom of Pop, if one may be so impertinent as to call her that, human considerations were paramount. Who else among her peers would have chosen to make portraits of the elderly, as with the 2 Old Lady sculptures of 1962 and 1967, (the first of which appeared in 1967 with a child on her knees on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper LP) at a time when the cult of youth, beauty, sexual allure and glamor made anyone over 30 all but invisible? These women have fused with the chairs on which they sit, literally becoming part of the furniture, ignored and unnoticed – except by the artist, who in depicting them, confers dignity upon them…The hand-knitted shawl worn by the first Old Lady, and the colorfully geometric quilt pulled over the lap of the second, subtly draw attention to the often overlooked creative contributions made by women to everyday life.

—Marco Livingstone, Catalogue for Mayor Gallery show, 2006

[edit] Representations of work

[edit] Public collections

Jann Haworth's work is represented in the following public collections:

  • The Arts Council of Great Britain
  • Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC
  • Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA
  • Museum Folkwang, Ludwig Collection, Essen, Germany
  • São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, Brazil
  • Bernado Collection, Sintra Museum of Modern Art de Belem, Lisbon, Portugal
  • Pallant House Gallery, West Sussex, England

[edit] Books

She is referenced in the following published works:

  • Image as Language, Christopher Finch (1969, Pelican)
  • Goodbye Baby and Amen by David Bailey and Peter Evans, 1969, Coward-McCann Inc. New York, p 44
  • Pop Art Re-defined by John Russell and Suzi Gablik, 1969, Frederick A Praeger Inc. New York, plates 11, 43 and 126.
  • Pop Art: An Illustrated Dictionary by Jose Pierre (1977, Eyre Methuen).
  • The Brotherhood of Ruralists, Nicholas Isherwood (1981, Lund Humphries, London) pp 42, 49/50 and 65
  • Pop Art, Tilman Osterwold (1989, Cosmo Press, Cologne) p 42
  • Pop Art, A Continuing History, Marco Livingstone (1990, Thames and Hudson, London) pp 166, 168/9, 257/8, 236-238
  • Blinds and Shutters, Michael Cooper and Bryan Roylance (1990, Genesis, Guildford, England) pp 53, 55, 58, 114, 188, 238/9, 262/3 and 267.
  • Walker Art Center – Painting and Sculpture from the Collection, Martin L Friedman (Rizzoli International Publications 1990)
  • Summer of Love, George Martin (1994, Macmillan, London)
  • Small Histories : Studies of Western Art, N P James (CV Publications, 2007)

[edit] Exhibition catalogues

She is referenced, inter alia, in the following Exhibition Catalogues:

  • Sharp Focus Realism, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, 1972, p13
  • Pop 60's Transatlantic Crossing, 1997, Centro Cultural de Belem, Portugal, pp156/7
  • Pop Art UK 1956-72, Modena, Italy 2004, Essay by Robert Melville pp 102 and 179, plates 103 and 105.
  • Art and the Sixties: This was Tomorrow, Tate Britain, 2004, pp 13, 25, 137 and plate 24.
  • British Pop, Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao, Spain, 2005 pp 422 and 466, plates 163, 167 and 171.
  • Artist's Cut: Jann Haworth, Mayor Gallery, Cork Street, London, 2006 (essays by Marco Livingstone and Christopher Finch)
  • Pop Art 1956-1968, Roma, Scuderie del Quirinale, a cura di Walter Guadagnini, pp140 and291, and plate 32

[edit] References

  1. ^ Gablik, Suzi; Russell, John (1969). Pop Art Redefined. London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 0-500-18094-6. 
  2. ^ White, Patricia; Lucie-Smith, Edward (1970). Art in Britain, 1969-70. London: Dent. ISBN 0-460-03888-5. 
  3. ^ Usherwood, Nicholas (1981). The Brotherhood of Ruralists: Ann Arnold, Graham Arnold, Peter Blake, Jann Haworth, David Inshaw, Annie Ovenden, Graham Ovenden. London: Lund Humphries in association with the London Borough of Camden. ISBN 0-85331-446-2. 
  4. ^ ABOUT. Retrieved on 2007-10-22. “In its first incarnation the mural will create images of up to 100 people by as many 30 artists of all ages.”

[edit] External links