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 Hollywood, California. Her mother Miriam Haworth was a distinguished ceramist, printmaker, and painter. Her father, Ted Haworth, was an 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:
After years of experimental artwork as a young artist, Jann Haworth took her talents to the University of California, Los Angeles in 1959.Jann Haworth - Bio
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.
Haworth began experimenting with sewn and stuffed soft sculptures. She made still life items (flowers, doughnuts) and progressed to her "Old Lady" doll and other life-sized figures.Christopher Finch, Jann Haworth: Artist's Cut [exh. cat], Mayor Gallery, London, 2006. Her work often contained specific references to American culture and to Hollywood in particular, as in her dummies of Mae West, Shirley Temple and W. C. Fields.Marco Livingstone, Jann Haworth: Artist's Cut [exh. cat], Mayor Gallery, London, 2006.
Haworth soon became a leading figure of the British Pop Art movement, and joined Pauline Boty as one of its only female practitioners in London. Her first major exhibition was at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1963, where she was selected to participate in 4 Young Artists (18 September – 19 October 1963) alongside British artists John Howlin, Brian Mills, and John Pearson. Three shows at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London followed, two of which were solo exhibitions. Her work was seen in Amsterdam and Milan and also was featured in the Hayward Gallery's landmark exhibition of Pop Art in 1968. That same year, she and her then-husband, Pop artist Peter Blake, won a Grammy for their album cover design of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Gallery owner Robert Fraser suggested to The Beatles that they commission 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 crowd gathered at this imaginary event, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison, as well as Haworth, Blake, and Fraser, listed of characters they wanted in attendance. Blake and Haworth then pasted life-size, black-and-white photographs of all the approved characters onto hardboard, which Haworth hand-tinted. Haworth 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.George Martin, Summer of Love (1994), pp. 114–116.
1970s to today In the 1970s, she and Blake were members of the Brotherhood of Ruralists, a group of artists that also included Ann and Graham Arnold, Annie and Graham Ovenden, and David Inshaw.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) In 1979 she founded and ran The Looking Glass School near Bath, Somerset, an arts-and-crafts primary and middle school. In the same year, 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 (two daughters, three stepdaughters, and a son). Still, she found time to illustrate (as Karen Haworth) six of Severy's books: Mystery Pig (1983), Unicorn Trap (1984), Rat's Castle (1985), High Jinks (1986), Burners and Breakers (1987), and Sea Change (1987). She also created five covers for the 1981 Methuen Arden Shakespeare editions of Richard III, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Henry the Fifth, and 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 Gimpel fils, London, in the mid-1990s, Haworth won a fellowship in 1997 to study American quilt-making. She returned to the United States and took up residence in 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.Thorpe, Vanessa, With a little help from her friends: Sgt Pepper artist’s all-female version, the Guardian, October 26, 20019 Haworth said "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." Together with over thirty local, national, and international artists of all ages, Haworth created a 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. 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.
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 2010 "Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968" - University of the Arts, Philadelphia [traveling exhibition] 2013 "Work to Do: Trent Alvey, Pam Bowman, Jann Haworth, Amy Jorgensen" - Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Utah
Public collections
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 - Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts, shared with Peter Blake for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band 1997 Churchill Fellowship specially designated Robert Fraser Award
References
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 Jann Haworth Official Website Interview with Jann Haworth in TATE, ETC. Issue 1 (Summer 2004) Jann Haworth Work In Progress interactive website
Videos Artist Snapshot: Jann Haworth, Davey Davis , Park City Television, 2008 , Channel 2 News, Utah