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.
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:
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]
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 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. [5] 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 .
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 ]
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]
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. [7] 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).
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: Adbusters, Akira Kurosawa, Alice, Alice Walker, Annie Lennox, Banksy's Rat, B.B. King, Beastie Boys, Benicio del Toro, Billie Holiday, Björk, Bob Marley, César Chávez, Charlize Theron, Cindy Sherman, Dalai Lama, David Bowie, David Hockney, Ellen DeGeneres, Erykah Badu, Eudora Welty, Enid (Thora Birch), Eve Ensler, Felix the Cat, Frank Zappa, Frida Kahlo, Garrison Keillor, Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Gore Vidal, Guerrilla Girls, Harvey Pekar, Hedwig, Howard Zinn, Jackie Robinson, Jane Goodall, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Bridges, Katharine Hepburn, Laurie Anderson, Lee Krasner, Little My and the Snork Maiden, Louise Brooks, Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou, Maya Lin, Miles Davis, 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.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the eighth studio album by the English rock band the Beatles. Released on 26 May 1967, Sgt. Pepper is regarded by musicologists as an early concept album that advanced the roles of sound composition, extended form, psychedelic imagery, record sleeves, and the producer in popular music. The album had an immediate cross-generational impact and was associated with numerous touchstones of the era's youth culture, such as fashion, drugs, mysticism, and a sense of optimism and empowerment. Critics lauded the album for its innovations in songwriting, production and graphic design, for bridging a cultural divide between popular music and high art, and for reflecting the interests of contemporary youth and the counterculture.
Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was an English artist and sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism and in particular modern sculpture. Along with artists such as Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, Hepworth was a leading figure in the colony of artists who resided in St Ives during the Second World War.
Sir Peter Thomas Blake is an English pop artist. He co-created the sleeve design for the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. His other works include the covers for two of The Who's albums, the cover of the Band Aid single "Do They Know It's Christmas?", and the Live Aid concert poster. Blake also designed the 2012 Brit Award statuette.
The 10th Annual Grammy Awards were held on February 29, 1968, at Chicago, Los Angeles, Nashville and New York. They recognized accomplishments of musicians for the year 1967.
Events from the year 1967 in art.
Robert Fraser, sometimes known as "Groovy Bob", was a London art dealer. He was a figure in the London cultural scene of the mid-to-late 1960s, and was close to members of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. In February 2015, the exhibition A Strong Sweet Smell of Incense: A Portrait of Robert Fraser, curated by Brian Clarke, was presented by Pace Gallery at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
Face Dances is the ninth studio album by English rock band the Who. It was released in 1981 by Warner Bros. in the United States and on Polydor in the United Kingdom. It is one of two Who studio albums with drummer Kenney Jones, who joined the band after Keith Moon's death three years earlier.
Pauline Boty was a British painter and co-founder of the 1960s' British Pop art movement of which she was the only acknowledged female member. Boty's paintings and collages often demonstrate a joy in self-assured femininity and female sexuality, as well as criticism of the "man's world" in which she lived. Her rebellious art, combined with her free-spirited lifestyle, has made Boty a herald of 1970s' feminism.
The Brotherhood of Ruralists is a British art group founded in 1975 in Wellow, Somerset, to paint nature. Their work is figurative with a strong adherence to 'traditional' skills. Painting in oil and watercolour predominate, with mixed media assemblage, printmaking, ink and pencil drawing also being common. It has been described as "a kind of late twentieth-century reinvention of William Morris's arcadian craft guilds."
Ann Arnold née Telfer, was an English fine art and figurative artist and a member of the Brotherhood of Ruralists.
Ann Dinah Ovenden is a British fine artist and a founder member of the Brotherhood of Ruralists. She is a figurative artist.
David Inshaw is a British artist who sprang to public attention in 1973 when his painting The Badminton Game was exhibited at the ICA Summer Studio exhibition in London. The painting was subsequently acquired by the Tate Gallery and is one of several paintings from the 1970s that won him critical acclaim and a wide audience. Others include The Raven, Our days were a joy and our paths through flowers, She did not turn, The Cricket Game, Presentiment and The River Bank (Ophelia).
Soft sculpture is a type of sculpture or three dimensional form that incorporates materials such as cloth, fur, foam rubber, plastic, paper, fibre or similar supple and nonrigid materials. Soft sculptures can be stuffed, sewn, draped, stapled, glued, hung, draped or woven. These materials and techniques distinguish soft sculptures from more traditional hard sculptures made from, for example, stone, bronze or wood that are then carved or modelled.
Michael Cooper (1941–1973) was a British photographer who is remembered for his photographs of leading rock musicians of the 1960s and early 1970s, most notably the many photos he took of The Rolling Stones from 1963 to 1973.
Clive Barker is a British pop artist. His work is present in private and museum collections including the Tate in London, the British Museum in London, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Victoria and Albert museum in London, the Wolverhampton Art Gallery in Wolverhampton, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim, the National Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide, the Berardo Collection Museum in Lisbon, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.
Colin E Self is an English Pop Artist whose work has addressed the theme of Cold War politics.
Richard Marshall Merkin was an American painter, illustrator and arts educator. Merkin's fascination with the 1920s and 1930s defined his art and shaped his identity as a professional dandy. Many of his works depict the interwar years, painting narrative scenes in bright colors of jazz musicians, film stars, writers, and sports heroes. Merkin was as well known for his outré sense of clothing style and collections of vintage pornography as he was for his painting and illustration work.
Evelyne Axell was a Belgian Pop painter. She is best known for her psychedelic, erotic paintings of female nudes and self-portraits on plexiglas that blend the hedonistic and Pop impulses of the 1960s. Elements of the 1960s—the Vietnam War, the Black Panthers movement, and the sexual liberation of women affected her work.
Waddington Custot is a London-based art gallery specialising in modern and contemporary art. Formerly known as Waddington Galleries, it has been situated on Mayfair's Cork Street since 1958.
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