Jann Haworth facts for kids
Jann Haworth (born in 1942) is a British-American pop artist. She is known for being a pioneer of soft sculpture, which means making sculptures from fabric and stuffing. She is most famous for helping create the cover of The Beatles' 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Haworth also champions rights for women, especially for their place in the art world.
Contents
Life and Work
Early Years
Jann Haworth was born in 1942 and grew up in Hollywood, California. Her mother, Miriam Haworth, was a talented artist who worked with ceramics, prints, and paintings. Her father, Ted Haworth, won an Academy Award for his work as an art director in movies.
Jann Haworth started creating experimental art when she was young. In 1959, she began studying at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The 1960s
After two years at UCLA, Jann moved to London, England, in 1961. There, she studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art and studio art at the Slade School of Fine Art. Haworth enjoyed being a rebellious female artist in a very traditional, male-dominated art school like the Slade.
During her time at art school, she developed her unique artistic style. She started experimenting with sculptures made by sewing and stuffing fabric. She first made everyday items like flowers and doughnuts. Soon, she moved on to creating her famous "Old Lady" doll and other life-sized figures. Her art often included references to American culture, especially Hollywood. For example, she made figures of famous stars like Mae West, Shirley Temple, and W. C. Fields.
Haworth quickly became a leading artist in the British Pop Art movement. She was one of the few female artists involved in Pop Art in London, alongside Pauline Boty. Her first big exhibition was at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1963. It was called 4 Young Artists. After that, she had three shows at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London, two of which were solo exhibitions just for her work. Her art was also shown in Amsterdam and Milan. In 1968, her work was part of an important Pop Art exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. That same year, she and her husband at the time, Pop artist Peter Blake, won a Grammy Award for their design of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Club Band album cover.
Haworth was a visionary artist who challenged gender stereotypes through her work. She emphasized the importance of female identity and used iconic female symbols in her soft sculptures. She refused to let male artists make her feel less successful.
Designing the Sgt. Pepper Album Cover
The gallery owner Robert Fraser suggested to The Beatles that they ask Peter Blake and Haworth to design the cover for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The first idea was to show The Beatles in their new band uniforms at a ceremony in a park. For the crowd in this imaginary event, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison, along with Haworth, Blake, and Fraser, each made a list of famous people they wanted to see.
Blake and Haworth then took life-sized, black-and-white photos of all the approved people and glued them onto hardboard. Haworth then hand-tinted these photos with color. She also added several fabric figures to the scene. These included one of her "Old Lady" figures and a Shirley Temple doll wearing a "Welcome The Rolling Stones" sweater. Haworth also came up with the idea of writing the band's name using civic flower-bed lettering, inspired by a flower-clock in West London.
From the 1970s to Today
In the 1970s, Jann Haworth and Peter Blake were part of the Brotherhood of Ruralists. This was a group of artists who focused on rural themes. In 1979, she started and ran The Looking Glass School near Bath, Somerset. This was a primary and middle school focused on arts and crafts. In the same year, she separated from Blake and began living with her current husband, the writer Richard Severy.
For the next twenty years, her art career took a backseat to raising her family. Still, she found time to illustrate six of Severy's books. She also created five covers for Shakespeare plays in 1981. Haworth also wrote three "how-to" art books for children: Paint (1993), Collage (1994), and Painting and Sticking (1995, with Miriam Haworth).
After having two solo exhibitions in London in the mid-1990s, Haworth won a fellowship in 1997 to study American quilt-making. She moved back to the United States and settled in Sundance, Utah. There, she founded the Art Shack Studios and Glass Recycling Works. She also helped start the Sundance Mountain Charter School. Since then, her art has been shown in solo exhibitions in London (2006), Wolverhampton Art Gallery (2007), and Paris (2008).
The SLC PEPPER Mural
In 2004, Haworth started working on SLC PEPPER. This is a huge mural, 50 feet tall and 30 feet wide, in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. It is an updated version of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. Haworth explained that the original album cover, though famous, was ready for a new look. She wanted to "turn the original inside out" by balancing different ethnic groups and genders, and making it relevant for today.
Haworth worked with over thirty local, national, and international artists of all ages. They created a new set of "heroes and heroines of the 21st century" using stencil graffiti. They replaced each person from the original cover with new figures. Only The Beatles' jackets remain as metal cut-outs. These cut-outs have holes for heads and hands, so visitors can "become part of the piece" and take souvenir photos. The first part of the mural was finished in 2005. SLC PEPPER is still an ongoing art project, with local artists continuing to add to its design.
More than 100 new people are included in SLC PEPPER. Some of them are: Akira Kurosawa, Alice, Alice Walker, Annie Lennox, B.B. King, Beastie Boys, Billie Holiday, Björk, Bob Marley, César Chávez, Charlize Theron, Cindy Sherman, Dalai Lama, David Bowie, Ellen DeGeneres, Erykah Badu, Felix the Cat, Frank Zappa, Frida Kahlo, Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Guerrilla Girls, Jackie Robinson, Jane Goodall, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Bridges, Katharine Hepburn, Laurie Anderson, Lee Krasner, Louise Brooks, Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou, Maya Lin, Miles Davis, Mother Jones, Muddy Waters, Nelson Mandela, Pablo Picasso, Peter Gabriel, Ray Charles, Richard Feynman, Rosa Parks, Samuel Beckett, Sojourner Truth, Sylvia Plath, Terry Gilliam, Tom Waits, Toni Morrison, and Tony Kushner.
Selected Exhibitions
Solo Exhibitions
- 1966 Robert Fraser Gallery, London
- 1966 Gallerie 20, Amsterdam
- 1968 Studio Marconi, Milan
- 1969 Robert Fraser Gallery, London
- 1971 "New Sculpture by Jann Haworth" Sidney Janis Gallery, New York City
- 1972 Arnolfini, Bristol
- 1974 Waddington Galleries, London
- 1993, 1995 Gimpel fils, London
- 2000 Sundance Screening Room, Utah
- 2006 "Jann Haworth: Artist's Cut" - Mayor Gallery, London
- 2008 "Jann Haworth" - Galerie du Centre, Paris
- 2009 "POP Jann Haworth" - Wolverhampton Art Gallery, UK
- 2017 "Never The Less" Emmanuel Art Gallery at the University of Colorado Denver - Denver, Colorado
- 2019-20 "Jann Haworth: Close Up" Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
Group Exhibitions
- 1963 "Four Young Artists" - Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
- 1963 "Young Contemporaries" - RBA Galleries, London
- 1968 "Works from 1956 to 1967" - Robert Fraser Gallery, London
- 1968 "Pop Art" - Hayward Gallery, London
- 1970 "Figures/Environments" - Walker Art Center, Minneapolis [traveling exhibition]
- 1972 "Sharp-Focus Realism by 28 Painters and Sculptors" - Sidney Janis Gallery, New York City
- 1994 "Worlds in a Box: Cornell, Fluxus, Herms, LeWitt, Samara" - Whitechapel Gallery, London
- 2004 "Pop Art UK: British Pop Art, 1958-1972" - Galleria Civica di Modena, Italy
- 2004 "Art and the 60s: This Was Tomorrow" - Tate Britain, London
- 2005 "British Pop" - Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Spain
- 2007 "Pop Art! 1956-1968" - Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome
- 2013 "Work to Do: Trent Alvey, Pam Bowman, Jann Haworth, Amy Jorgensen" - Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Utah
Public Collections
Jann Haworth's art can be found in many public collections around the world, including:
- Arts Council of Great Britain
- Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC
- Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
- Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany
- São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, Brazil
- Sintra Museum of Modern Art-Berardo Collection, Portugal
- Pallant House Gallery, West Sussex, England
- Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton, England
- Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, Utah
Awards
- 1967 Edinburgh 400 Prize winner
- 1968 Grammy Award for Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts, shared with Peter Blake for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles
- 1997 Churchill Fellowship, specially designated Robert Fraser Award
See also
In Spanish: Jann Haworth para niños
