Janet Abrams
Trained in journalism after an undergraduate degree in Architecture, Janet Abrams received her PhD in architectural history and theory at Princeton University in New Jersey on a Fulbright scholarship. Her book, Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bauhaus: Profiles in Architecture and Design, published in 2020, is a collection of essays on emerging “Starchitects” and their new buildings that appeared in Blueprint. She subsequently served as features editor of Punch magazine; director of the Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism; writer-at-large for I.D. International Design magazine; and adjunct professor in the MFA graphic design program at Yale University and Parsons School of Design; and visiting associate professor in the School of Architecture + Planning at the University of New Mexico. She has also served as freelance curator/host of conferences on design, technology and culture for organizations including AIGA, Cooper Union, and Parsons School of Design. As editor at the Netherlands Design Institute (NDI) in Amsterdam, she published IF/THEN: PLAY (on the digital turn in play) and co-organized NDI’s fifth Doors of Perception conference. As director of the University of Minnesota Design Institute, she appointed dozens of emerging artists and designers as DI Fellows to teach new courses, create design prototypes, and publish innovative research, including ELSE/WHERE: MAPPING (co-edited with Peter Hall).
During a break in the conference on “Craft and Design: Hand, Mind, and the Creative Process” at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in 2004, she found her way to the ceramics studio, dipped her hand in a bucket of clay slip, and was immediately captivated. This led to an MFA in Ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where she experimented with materials beyond clay and discovered artists whose inquiries into physical phenomena such as light, gravity, density, and atmospheric conditions would inform her own practice.
In 2014, a year after relocating to Santa Fe, NM, Abrams won SITE Santa Fe’s SPREAD 5.0 competition for visual artists and used the grant award to establish her studio and take sculpture courses at Santa Fe Community College, where she overcame her terror of power tools and became adept at lost wax bronze casting.
A philomath, Abrams has a “mad scientist” curiosity about materials, which she traces back to studying A-Level chemistry and physics at her London high school. She has had residencies at A.I.R. Vallauris in France, the European Ceramic Work Centre in the Netherlands, and MacDowell; and has participated in workshops at Anderson Ranch, Banff Centre, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and Ox-Bow School of Art. Her essays have been published in artist monographs, exhibition catalogs, and periodicals such as Ceramic Review, Crafts, Domus, frieze, New York Times, and Southwest Contemporary. In 2020, she co-curated and designed/built the website for Quartz Inversion, [CE1] a showcase of work made by over sixty international ceramic artists during the COVID-19 lockdown.
