Janet Ellen Morgan
Encyclopedia
Janet Ellen Morgan is an expressionist artist, working in landscape and figurative genres, with additional experience in book illustration and theatrical design.

Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan on September 30, 1954, to Gladys & James Morgan, noted economist and member National Academy of Science, whose mother, Rose Ann Davis Morgan, was a WPA trained painter. She is married to painter Gregory Frux
Gregory William Frux
Gregory William Frux is a traditional realist artist, working mainly in the landscape genre. His oil paintings document both New York’s cityscapes and wilderness locations in North and South America.- Biography :...

.

Move to New York City

After earning her MFA in 1979 she moved to New York City. She ran the poetry and small press department at the Gotham Book Mart
Gotham Book Mart
The Gotham Book Mart, in operation from 1920 to 2007, was a famous midtown Manhattan bookstore and cultural landmark. The business was located first in a small basement space on West 45th Street near the Theater District, it then moved to 51 West 47th Street, then spent many years at 41 West 47th...

. for most of the 80’s. From 1988- 2006, while continuing to work as an artist she supported herself as Expressive Arts Therapist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, in the Adult Recreation Department, where she also edited a magazine of patient’s art and writings, and worked on the annual Patient Art Show. She married artist Gregory Frux
Gregory William Frux
Gregory William Frux is a traditional realist artist, working mainly in the landscape genre. His oil paintings document both New York’s cityscapes and wilderness locations in North and South America.- Biography :...

 in 1990. They moved to Brooklyn in 1992.

Summary

Janet pursued her creative work with large watercolors, both figurative and landscape. She has had over 100 exhibitions, including shows at the National Museum of Art of Kyrgyzstan , the Burning Man Festival
Burning Man
Burning Man is a week-long annual event held in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada, in the United States. The event starts on the Monday before the American Labor Day holiday, and ends on the holiday itself. It takes its name from the ritual burning of a large wooden effigy on Saturday evening...

, the Omega Institute’s Women and Power Conference and the Cordoba Museum in Alaska . Janet Morgan has been artist-in-residence in Death Valley National Park, Weir Farm National History Site in Connecticut, and the Omega Institute in New York. She worked for 18 years as an Expressive Arts Therapist at Sloan Kettering with adult cancer patients, and is now a full time artist. Recently Janet and husband Greg Frux
Gregory William Frux
Gregory William Frux is a traditional realist artist, working mainly in the landscape genre. His oil paintings document both New York’s cityscapes and wilderness locations in North and South America.- Biography :...

 were the subject of an article focusing on their desert art.

Artistic Residences

Death Valley: 2005, 2006 and 2008
Pahrump Valley Times
Death Valley Residency
Ranger talk schedule

Weir Farm 2001 Weir Farm National Historic Site 2001
Weir Farm National Historic Site
Weir Farm National Historic Site is located in Ridgefield and Wilton, Connecticut, in the United States. It commemorates the life and work of J. Alden Weir, the American impressionist painter and member of the Cos Cob Art Colony. Tours of his studio are offered by National Park Service rangers....



The Omega Institute 2003, 2007, 2008, and 20210 The Omega Institute

Morgan’s Supreme Beings: The God and Goddess Project

The God and Goddess series began in January 1988 and has steadily grown to nearly two hundred paintings. These large format (26” by 40") watercolor portraits of homemade and traditional deities celebrate aspects of the divine and of the human. Janet says of the series, “They are a way for us to see ourselves as sacred, and so to honor our own powers and our foibles. They can be serious, like The God of War, or irreverent like The Goddess of the Joys of Petty Thievery, or important ones for our own time like The God of Safe Sex or The Bee Goddess.” Many writers and artists, including Judith Malina
Judith Malina
Judith Malina is an American theater and film actress, writer, and director, who was one of the founders of The Living Theatre.-Early life:...

, founder of the Living Theater and poet Sheryl Saint Germain
Sheryl St. Germain
Sheryl St. Germain is an American poet, essayist, and professor.She is of Cajun and Creole descent. Her father was Jules St. Francois St. Germain and her mother Myrl Marie Frank. Born and raised in south Louisiana, much of her work deals with the culture and environment of Louisiana...

 , have contributed to these works in order to flesh out these supreme beings and give them many voices.

MicroCoSM Show 2006

Williamsburg Art and Historical Center's Sensual Abundance Show 2004 season

Performance and Politics in the America Online Magazine - April 2008/Issue 5.1

Williamsburg Art and Historical Center's CROSSED DESTINIES
A Tarot of the Artists 2005

Landscapes

“There are any number of artists who portray, with great veracity, the features of the landscapes around us. Janet is one of a very few who convey, with stirring luminosity, the vivid textures of our primal relationship with place and the wonders of those landscapes mirrored within us. “ Rowland Russell, writer, ecologist

Janet became inspired to paint landscapes first in the American Southwest by the sacred places of the Anasasi and the living sites of contemporary Native Americans. She realized that landscape painting could be as expressionists, interpretive and personal as any other kind of painting. *See influences.
Janet Morgan has painted and drawn in Antarctica, Kyrgyzstan, Bolivia, Peru, Death Valley, Eastern Oregon, the Canadian Rockies, Utah and many other places in North America.

Her work has be showed or reproduced at the following places:

Whole Terrain Magazine
Artists Space
Theme Antarctica Page
Brooklyn Arts Council Print Portfolio
Yosemite Renaissance Exhibition
Yosemite Auction
Death Valley Journal

Belly Dance Paintings

Janet began to pursue belly dance in 1996, as an amateur dancer, choreographer and costume designer. This interest translated in a series of paintings exhibited at:

Tabla Rasa Gallery's Music to my Eyes show

Shira.net Bellydance art

Lafayette Grill and Bar 2008 Durga: An Evening of Dance(NYC)

Whole Terrain Issue 14 Whole Terrain Magazine Cover

Celebration Art

Janet worked with Earth Celebrations for the Lower East Side Garden Pageants in the past, and recently has been an artist in residence for the Hudson River Pageants in New York City.
http://www.earthcelebrations.com/arts-pageants/hudson-visual-artist-bios/
You can see what's involved in this short film:
Interview in documentary by Earth Celebrations on the Hudson River Pageant Workshops

Education

BFA Minneapolis College of Art and Design, studied with Kinji Akagawa
Kinji Akagawa
Kinji Akagawa is an American sculptor and arts educator best known for sculptural constructions that also serve a practical function. A pioneer in the public art movement, Akagawa has throughout his career examined the relationship between art and community, most notably the concept of art as a...


Image of Kinji’s Portrait] by Janet Morgan Minneapolis Star Tribune and Siah Armajani
Siah Armajani
Siah Armajani is an Iranian-born American sculptor.Siah Armajani designed the Olympic Torch presiding over the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, United States...



Junior year at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (Eric Fischl and Mira Schor),
MFA University of Wisconsin at Madison (Warrington Colescot
Warrington Colescott
Warrington Colescott is an American artist best known for his satirical etchings. He lives and works in Hollandale, Wisconsin where he and his wife, artist Frances Myers, operate Mantegna Press.- Early life and influences :...

).
While at the University of Wisconsin Ms. Morgan studied fine press books with Walter Hamady.

Fine Art Book Illustration

Janet Morgan began to illustrate books while at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (all of the following are in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. The following is a list of her work.

Perishable Press

Song of the Sly Mongoose, Poems by Arthur Brown (1981) Found in many library collections including the Evergreen State College, James F. Holly Rare Books Collection (Perishable Press).
as well as the Stanford University Library

Rara Avis Press

Birds by Bruno Schultz (1979)is in many rare book collections including the Stanford University Library

Red Ozier Press

The sea & ourselves at Cape Ann by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers...

 (1979)
Ancient Song by Mark Glass (1980).
The Tall Schooner : a poem by Salvatore Quasimodo (1980) Exhibition at Center for Book Arts
Center for Book Arts
The Center for Book Arts in New York City is the first organization of its kind in the United States dedicated to contemporary interpretations of the book as an art object while preserving traditional practices of the art of the book....


Cross Cultural Communications

Mask of Medusa, poems by Sheryl St. Germain
Sheryl St. Germain
Sheryl St. Germain is an American poet, essayist, and professor.She is of Cajun and Creole descent. Her father was Jules St. Francois St. Germain and her mother Myrl Marie Frank. Born and raised in south Louisiana, much of her work deals with the culture and environment of Louisiana...

 (1987)
Unfinished Sequence, by Edward Butscher (1981)

Perivale Press

Going Home by Sheryl St. Germain (1988)

Influences

Emily Carr
Emily Carr
Emily Carr was a Canadian artist and writer heavily inspired by the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. One of the first painters in Canada to adopt a post-impressionist painting style, Carr did not receive widespread recognition for her work until later in her life...



Georgia O'Keefe

Charles Burchfield

William Robinson

External links

  • Janet Morgan's Home Page (http://janetmorgan.net/)
  • Art and Adventures (http://artandadventures.com/)
  • Janet Morgan's Extended Resume (http://janetmorgan.net/resume.html)
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