Joel Janowitz: Refuge

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Joel Janowtiz’s new paintings and monotypes create a Refuge for the viewer, a safe space where one can feel protected and secure.  Refuge for Janowitz has become the greenhouses at Wellesley College.  First painted in the 1970s, he returns to the subject with a new series. The brush strokes are freer, the content more abstract, and his extraordinary use of light and dark illustrate day and night.  Painted during a long period of isolation, the resulting pieces are not about loneliness but a meditative solitude and hope.

This exhibition presents my fourth series of greenhouse paintings. In the mid 1970s, I worked from life at the Ferguson Greenhouses at Wellesley College. That first series focused on the complex structure of light and space within the greenhouse, resulting in work that felt lively yet quietly contemplative. In the 1980s, I returned to the greenhouse theme, this time at night, to paint the contradictions and mystery of artificial illumination and darkness in its normally sun-filled interior. A third series from the early 2000s dissolved and abstracted the spatial structure, with loosened brushwork and invented color. 

Now, 2021 has brought me back to greenhouse imagery again. As we live through the isolation of the pandemic and the growing anxiety of global warming, these paintings suggest a refuge of safety without ignoring the cacophony and weight of our current crises. J. Janowitz, 2021.

Janowitz, a Boston-based artist, has exhibited his works since 1973, both in the United States and abroad – totaling 30 solo exhibitions to date. His work is in numerous collections, including Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; University of California, Santa Barbara, CA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; and the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.  The recipient of many awards, Janowitz received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2008 & 2016 Artist Fellowship in Painting from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and a 2013 Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.