Jann Haworth

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Haworth in 2012

Jann Haworth (born 1942) is a British-American

pop artist. A pioneer of soft sculpture, she is best known as the co-creator of The Beatles' 1967 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
album cover. Haworth is also an advocate for feminist rights especially for the representation of women in the art world.

Life and work

Early years

Haworth was born in 1942 and raised in

Academy Award-winning art director
. Since Haworth was surrounded by artistic talent from a young age, she describes the experience as having a strong influential impact on the development of her artistic goals and the presentations of her artworks-whether they were installation pieces or two dimensional:

My mother taught me how to sew. I was eight when I made my first petticoat, and from that point on I made dolls, their clothing and almost everything I wore. My father was a Hollywood production designer. I shadowed him on the sets. This influenced my work in the 1960s. I thought of the installations that I did as film sets. The concept of the stand-in, the fake, the dummy, the latex model as surrogates for the real, came from being with my father. —Jann Haworth[1]

After years of experimental artwork as a young artist, Jann Haworth took her talents to the University of California, Los Angeles in 1959.[2]

1960s

After two years at

UCLA, she moved in 1961 to London, England, where she studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art and studio art at the Slade School of Fine Art
. Haworth reveled in being a rebellious woman artist within a conservative, male-dominated institution like the Slade.

I liked the Slade’s fustiness; it was another thing to push against...The assumption was that, as one tutor put it, “the girls were there to keep the boys happy”. He prefaced that by saying “it wasn’t necessary for them to look at the portfolios of the female students…they just needed to look at their photos”. From that point, it was head-on competition with the male students. I was annoyed enough, and American enough, to take that on. I was determined to better them, and that’s one of the reasons for the partly sarcastic choice of cloth, latex and sequins as media. It was a female language to which the male students didn’t have access. —Jann Haworth[1]

It was in those formative years at art school that her aesthetic sense was first established. She began experimenting with sewn and stuffed soft sculptures. She made still life items (flowers, doughnuts) and quickly progressed to her now iconic "Old Lady" doll and other life-sized figures.[3] Her work often contained specific references to American culture and to Hollywood in particular, as is readily apparent in her dummies of Mae West, Shirley Temple and W. C. Fields.[4]

Haworth soon became a leading figure of the British

Grammy for their album cover design of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
.

Haworth was a visionary and a pioneer in the face of the American feminist movements of the 1960s by challenging gendered stereotypes through her artworks, while emphasizing the importance of having a female identity that emphasized iconic female symbols in her soft sculptures. Haworth refused to let her male peers intimidate her and diminish her success.[citation needed]

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

See also: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Gallery owner Robert Fraser suggested to The Beatles that they commission Peter Blake and Haworth to design the cover for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The original concept was to have The Beatles dressed in their new "Northern brass band" uniforms appearing at an official ceremony in a park. For the great crowd gathered at this imaginary event, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison, as well as Haworth, Blake, and Fraser, all submitted a list of characters they wanted to see in attendance. Blake and Haworth then pasted life-size, black-and-white photographs of all the approved characters onto hardboard, which Haworth subsequently hand-tinted. Haworth also added several cloth dummies to the assembly, including one of her "Old Lady" figures and a Shirley Temple doll who wears a "Welcome The Rolling Stones" sweater. Inspired by the municipal flower-clock in Hammersmith, West London, Haworth also came up with the idea of writing out the name of the band in civic flower-bed lettering.[6]

1970s to today

In the 1970s, she and Blake were members of the

Coriolanus
. Haworth also authored three "how-to" art books for children: Paint (1993), Collage (1994), and Painting and Sticking (with Miriam Haworth, 1995).

After mounting two solo exhibitions 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, her career has exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Mayor Gallery, London (2006), Wolverhampton Art Gallery (2007), and Galerie du Centre, Paris (2008). She also has been represented in numerous Pop art
retrospectives, including "Pop Art UK" (Modena, 2004), "Pop Art and the 60s: This Was Tomorrow" (London, 2004), "Pop Art! 1956-1968" (Rome, 2007), and "Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968" (Philadelphia, 2009).

SLC PEPPER

In 2004, Haworth began work on SLC PEPPER, a 50-feet × 30-feet civic wall mural in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, representing an updated version of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover.[8] As Haworth stated, "The original album cover, famous though it is, is an icon ready for the iconoclast. We will be turning the original inside out... ethnic and gender balancing, and evaluating for contemporary relevance."[9] Together with over thirty local, national, and international artists of all ages, Haworth created a new set of "heroes and heroines of the 21st century" in stencil graffiti, replacing each of the personalities depicted in the original. Only the Beatles' jackets remain as metal cut-outs with head and hand holes so that visitors may "become part of the piece" by taking souvenir photos.[10] The first phase of the mural's construction was completed in 2005. SLC PEPPER remains an ongoing arts project, where local artists will continue to add to its design.

Among the more than 100 new people included in SLC PEPPER are:

Mother Jones, Muddy Waters, Nelson Mandela, Pablo Picasso, Peter Gabriel, Robert Rauschenberg, Ray Charles, Richard Feynman, Rosa Parks, Samuel Beckett, Sojourner Truth, Sylvia Plath, Terry Gilliam, Tom Waits, Thom Yorke, Toni Morrison, and Tony Kushner
.

Selected exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

Group exhibitions

Public collections

Awards

References

  1. ^ a b Interview with Jann Haworth in "Still Swinging After All These Years?" TATE, ETC. Issue 1 (Summer 2004)
  2. ^ Jann Haworth - Bio
  3. ^ Christopher Finch, Jann Haworth: Artist's Cut [exh. cat], Mayor Gallery, London, 2006.
  4. ^ Marco Livingstone, Jann Haworth: Artist's Cut [exh. cat], Mayor Gallery, London, 2006.
  5. ^ Penrose, Roland (1963). 4 Young Artists (exhibition catalogue). London: Institute of Contemporary Arts.
  6. ^ George Martin, Summer of Love (1994), pp. 114–116.
  7. ^ Nicholas Usherwood, 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, 1981)
  8. ^ Thorpe, Vanessa, With a little help from her friends: Sgt Pepper artist’s all-female version, the Guardian, October 26, 20019
  9. ^ "ABOUT". www.jannhaworth.com. Retrieved 19 July 2018.
  10. ^ "SLC PEPPER". www.jannhaworth.com. Retrieved 19 July 2018.
  11. ^ "Jann Haworth: Close Up". Pallant House Gallery. Retrieved 11 November 2020.
  12. ^ "Exhibition Explores Utah?s Unique Gender Politics". Brigham Young University Museum of Art. 28 April 2013. Retrieved 19 July 2018.
  13. ^ "UMFA: Utah Museum of Fine Arts - Jann Haworth - The White Charm Bracelet". Archived from the original on 11 October 2014. Retrieved 20 August 2023.

Bibliography

Books

  • 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 (1990, Rizzoli International Publications)
  • Summer of Love, George Martin (1994, Macmillan, London)
  • Small Histories : Studies of Western Art, N.P. James (CV Publications, 2007)

Exhibition catalogues

  • Sharp Focus Realism (Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, 1972), p 13
  • The Pop 60's: Transatlantic Crossing (Centro Cultural de Belem, Portugal, 1997), pp 156–7
  • Pop Art UK 1956-72 (Galleria Civica di Modena, Italy, 2004), 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, London, 2006)
  • Pop Art! 1956-1968 (Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome, 2007), pp 140 and 291, plate 32
  • POP Jann Haworth (Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton, 2009)

External links

Videos

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jann_Haworth&oldid=1211443845"