Utah Artist With a Love for Donuts Announces New Exhibition

Utah Artist With a Love for Donuts Announces New Exhibition

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH – June 5, 2015 (Gephardt Daily) -Many artists might have a love for eating donuts. But not as many enjoy making art about the sugary dessert. Local artist Jann Haworth, who has a show coming up in downtown Salt Lake City this month, said donuts have always piqued her interest. So in honor of National Donut Day, we chatted to the internationally renowned artist, who is the co-designer of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover and also the creator of SLC Pepper.

She said her donut predilection started when she attended North Hollywood High. “The story starts with High School and The Big Donut Drive In which was on Laurel Canyon and on the way to North Hollywood High. So it was breakfast. Black coffee, because I was 16 and a grown up, and two donuts: a plain and a chocolate donut- every morning after I picked up my chum Pat Slattery,” she said.

Her interest continued when she moved to London. “Because I was telling ‘my story’ of being a Californian displaced in London,” she said. “These were part of the pieces The Old Lady, Frank, the Dog, Flowers, The Surfer, The Cowboy and the Charm Bracelet. California dreaming I guess.

“And because I was using cloth….it struck me as very funny that different ‘printed patterns’ could be interpreted as different flavors. So what would tartan taste like or red and white stripes or lace or red velvet? Also because they are subversive; a comical version of ‘the still life’–but puffed out  like the cartoon items. A serious topic; the still life done in a non-serious way..

She said the bottom line for her is that donuts in cloth make her laugh. “When I made the first ones in 1962 I wanted to do jeans flavored donuts so I cut the bottom off my jeans to make them….I thought that the  English would find the whole idea really amusing,” she said. “They didn’t.  For me a cloth donut- the idea of eating it- the trick of thinking for a moment that it is real-that you feel a bit foolish-and then laugh at being caught out and the weird pleasure of seeing something desirable that would actually fill your mouth with stuffing–all that amuses me. Am I twisted?”

Finally, she said her Mom had once seen a sign that said: “As you go through life make this your goal look at the donut not the hole,” and that was a saying she remembered.

Haworth’s upcoming exhibition, Round Trip, at Modern West Fine Art, 200 S. 177 East, Salt Lake City, opens on Friday, June 19, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. and closes July 16.
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Born and raised in Hollywood, California, Jann Haworth spent her formative years in the film capitol of the world. The daughter of an artist mother and an Oscar-winning set designer father, Haworth was artistically inclined from an early age. After studying at the University of California, Los Angeles, Haworth embarked on a journey that would lay the groundwork for her remarkable career. In December 1961, she arrived in London to study at the Slade School of Fine Art. In the ensuing decades, London became Haworth’s creative playground-the site where many of her artistic breakthroughs occurred.

Independent of the New York Pop movement, and unknowingly leading the charge for other female artists, Haworth’s aesthetic engendered an impassioned reconsideration of the found object-something that art historians would later define as the critical apex of the Pop movement.

Just as London broadened the young artist’s creative horizon, Haworth’s return to the United States was the impetus for a completely new transformation. In the early 1990s, Haworth saw the arrival to her native country as an opportunity to both re-discover her past and craft an entirely new future. After settling in Utah, Haworth fused the techniques used in patchwork with the linear time forms seen in comics and filmstrips using canvas, vinyl and fabrics to address the classic topics of painting. Her career demonstrates a remarkable amount of diversity and innovation-constantly evolving in both appearance and tone.

Haworth is known for pioneering soft sculpture-part of an artistic process that relished in unconventional materials and sought to form new relationships with viewers. While not deliberately Feminist in intent, her technique and materials-that of sewing and quilting-affirm the often gendered associations that such ‘women’s work’ evokes. The undeniable ingenuity of her unique process affirms the difficulty of mastering these techniques, despite the gendered connotations used to discredit them.

Round Trip tells of a cross-national journey-across oceans and cultures. The artworks in this exhibition individually speak to three distinct places crucial to Haworth’s artistic practice: Hollywood, London and Utah. In each location, a transformation of sorts is detectable, making visible the enormous role of place in the artist’s creations. More inforamtion is available at: www.modernwestfineart.com