Janet Morgan

Thunderbolt, Coney Island, colorful pastel with historic amusement park

2020

Janet Morgan has had a long and varied creative life, creating art, teaching, dancing, and she spent 18 years working as an expressive arts therapist with adult cancer patients at Sloan Kettering. Her flexible creativity encompasses painting, costuming and creating props for events, environmentally based celebration art and teaching. Painting is at the core of it all. Janet received a public art commission from the New York City Department of Education for an Early Childhood Center in Queens. It is made up of ceramic reliefs on a circus theme of aerialists, acrobats and animals. For Earth Celebrations in New York City she worked on environmentally themed pageants on both the Hudson River and the Lower East Side Community Gardens; conducting workshops with school children to create robes, puppets, hats, staffs and banners, many based on the local animals and plants. Her large (8 X 8 foot) acrylic paintings have been featured at the 2018 Parliament of World Religions in Toronto, on stage at the Omega’s Women and Power Conference in New York City in 2004, at Burning Man in 2007. She has been artist-in-residence in Death Valley National Park three times, culminating in an exhibition and a children’s book. She did a residency at the Weir Farm National Historic Site in Connecticut, the Babayan Culture House in Cappadocia in Turkey, The Luminous Bodies Residency at Artscape Gibraltar in Toronto. She has been doing a teaching residency annually at The Omega Institute in Rhinebeck New York for 14 years. Janet has traveled, taught and painted widely. She has painted landscapes inspired by her travels in Central Asia, Africa, Antarctica, Iceland, South and North America. She has also worked figuratively for years. Janet created her own pantheon of Gods and Goddesses, now numbering over two hundred large format watercolor paintings. She has taught her a workshop on “How to Create Your Own Deity” at the Rubin Museum of Art, the Art Students League of New York, the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, and many other places. She has had well over 100 exhibits, and has shown at the National Museum of Art of Kyrgyzstan, Death Valley National Park Visitor Center, the Fashion Institute of Technology, the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, the UN, the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York City, the Tabla Rasa Gallery, Coney Island Museum and Williamsburg Art & Historical Center in Brooklyn. Janet is on the board of director of Artfront Galleries, which produces numerous pop-up shows, and now virtual shows, for the wonderfully diverse Newark art community. She has curated and created catalogs for Artfront exhibitions.