| Janet Ellen Morgan | |
| Birth Place: | Ann Arbor |
| Website: | http://janetmorgan-art.net |
| Field: | Visual arts; expeditionary art |
Janet Ellen Morgan is an American artist, author, and teacher noted for her landscapes and the creation of a pantheon of 150 original deities.[1] [2] [3] Her work spans environmental education and public art.[4] She is also the author and illustrator of children's books.[5] [6]
Morgan received her BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and her MFA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Morgan's expressionist landscapes in watercolor and pastel are depictions of geology, weather and movement of all kinds within the environment. Her travels have profoundly influenced her artistic vision, allowing her to capture the unique qualities of various landscapes, including those in Antarctica, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Bolivia, Peru, Patagonia, Death Valley, Eastern Oregon, the Canadian Rockies, and southern Utah.[7] Morgan's landscapes have garnered critical acclaim, with writer and ecologist Rowland Russell praising her ability to "convey, with stirring luminosity, the vivid textures of our primal relationship with place and the wonders of those landscapes mirrored within us."[8] Of her Death Valley Art, film director Ken Burns wrote, "These are beautiful works evocative of the great beauty of our land."
Morgan's God and Goddess series, which began in January 1988, consists of large-format watercolor portraits that celebrate aspects of the divine and the human, offering a way for the viewer to see themselves as sacred. The series features a variety of deities, from serious figures like The God of War to irreverent ones like The Goddess of the Joys of Petty Thievery, and even contemporary ones like The God of Safe Sex or The Bee Goddess.
In 2010, Morgan created a public art project for an early childhood center in Queens, New York, commissioned by New York City Public Schools. This project, funded with a budget of $50,000, featured three circus-inspired designs. These designs were transformed into large tiles and installed in the stanchions of the school's fencing, alternating between right-side-up and upside-down orientations. The architect for this project was Andrzej Dudziński.[9] [10] [11]
Morgan has done a number of artistic and teaching residencies.[12] Among the residencies are Death Valley National Park,[13] Weir Farm National Historic Site,[14] the Babayan Cultural Center in Cappadocia, Turkey,[15] Hanksville Elementary School in Utah, and the Luminous Bodies Residency Toronto.[16]
Morgan is a current member of the New York Artists Circle (NYAC).[17]
Morgan has authored and illustrated two children's books, Welcome to Death Valley! [18] (2012) and the award winning Coney Island Awakes (2022).[19] [20] [21] [22] She has also illustrated more than fourteen books, including The Sea & Ourselves at Cape Ann by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1979) and Metamorphoses by Sheryl St. Germain (2020). She also has created exhibition catalogs for a number of shows including Quintessence Three Visions for the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. In the introduction to this catalog, author Kim Stanley Robinson praised Morgan's work, stating:
Morgan’s images display our own felt electricity, the crackling auras and fields that we know for sure are there, not just from new scientific sensors, but from the way our bodies so often feel. We are not only stardust, but wild patterned energy, dust devils swirling through space for just a time.[23]
Morgan has taught at the Art Students League of New York,[24] the Rubin Museum of Art,[25] [26] and the Omega Institute and Death Valley National Park. She also worked as an Expressive Arts Therapist with adult cancer patients at Memorial Sloan Kettering for 18 years.[27] [28]