Episode 89 / JANIS PROVISOR | artist, painter, Connecticut / NYC | Independent Special 2024
Recorded February 21, 2024, 41 min., language english
Janis Provisor is a New Yorker, residing between Connecticut and New York City. Janis is an accomplished artist with a vast career in the arts, showing in galleries all over the world as well as having her work in many museum collections. Janis will be having a solo-presentation of her work with Halsey McKay at the Independent 2024. Now in her seventies Janis gathered a lot of experience in art and life and shares her wisdom in our talk. Being very young she was taken to Museums by Family members. She already felt then she wanted to be an artist, not knowing at all what that was about. She studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, right after the Summer of Love, receiving her MFA in 1971. Although the 70s were a great time for experimenting and going new ways in the arts and society, it was not a great time for women resp. women artists. Janis reflects on how the status of women has changed in the past decades and how much there is still to do. In 1989, along with her husband and son, she left New York for an adventure in China and Hong Kong, they ended up staying for nine years, running their own company Fort Street Studios in China in the 1990s, designing, manufacturing, and selling hand-knotted silk carpets. Through all these years she constantly developed and experimented, which helped her finding her individual voice as artist and woman. Janis often starts her paintings with writing and putting her thoughts, her feelings out on the canvas. In the process of painting those words often get obscured and a physical and emotional process starts, in which Janis let's loose and allows her body to paint the way it needs to. Being jewish, she now processes and expresses her torn feelings about the war and the humanitarian crisis in the near east. For the presentation at the Independent she is now creating a new body of work, which will be as free and open as possible, while still being very concentrated and essential to fit the format of a fair presentation.
Artist website:
https://www.janisprovisorstudio.com/
Artist history:
https://fortstreetstudio.com/founders/
https://www.rizzoliusa.com/book/9788891829627/