Jann Haworth

• 1. Introduction

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  Jann Haworth was eight years old when she sewed her first petticoat. That small act of making, she would later say, set in motion a way of thinking that would eventually reshape British pop art, provoke a conservative London art institution, and place her name on one of the most recognised album covers in recorded music history.

  Haworth was born in 1942 and raised in Hollywood, California, inside a household where art was not a hobby but a profession. Her mother, Miriam Haworth, was a ceramist, printmaker, and painter. Her father, Ted Haworth, won an Academy Award as an art director and worked as a Hollywood production designer. The young Haworth shadowed him on film sets, watching how a crew could build a fake world convincing enough to stand in for a real one.

  That early immersion in the constructed, the theatrical, and the handmade became the engine of her artistic practice. When she moved to London in 1961, she brought that sensibility into a British art world that was not ready for it, and certainly not ready for a woman to carry it. How she carved out her place, how cloth and latex became her medium of resistance, and what she did with a set of cardboard cut-outs for a band called The Beatles in 1967 are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Hollywood to the Slade

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  In 1959, Haworth enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, and two years later crossed the Atlantic to study at both the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

  The Slade carried its reputation as a rigorous institution, but it was also openly hostile to women. One tutor, Haworth recalled, told students that it was not necessary to look at the portfolios of female students, only at their photographs, and that the women were there to keep the boys happy. Haworth’s response was not to leave but to compete head-on. She described herself as annoyed enough, and American enough, to take that challenge on directly.

  Her chosen weapons were cloth, latex, and sequins. She picked them precisely because they were coded as female, a language to which, in her words, the male students did not have access. The sewing skills her mother had taught her became a form of defiance inside a male-dominated school. She began constructing sewn and stuffed soft sculptures, starting with still life objects such as flowers and doughnuts, then graduating to her signature “Old Lady” figure and other life-sized forms.

  Her dummies of Mae West, Shirley Temple, and W. C. Fields drew directly from the Hollywood of her childhood, channelling the production designer’s logic of stand-ins and surrogates into a fine art context. That blending of American pop culture with British art-world ambition quickly drew serious attention.

• 3. Pop Art's Female Frontier

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  On the 18th of September 1963, Haworth’s first major exhibition opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The show, titled 4 Young Artists, ran until the 19th of October and placed her alongside John Howlin, Brian Mills, and John Pearson.

  Her arrival in London coincided with the emergence of a pop art movement there, and she joined Pauline Boty as one of its only female practitioners in the city. Three shows at the Robert Fraser Gallery followed, two of them solo exhibitions. Her work also traveled to Amsterdam and Milan, and in 1968 her pieces appeared in the Hayward Gallery’s landmark pop art survey.

  The gallery owner Robert Fraser was a central figure in her network, and the connections she built through his gallery would prove consequential. Haworth won the Edinburgh 400 Prize in 1967, recognition that arrived at a moment when her reputation was already extending beyond Britain.

  By the time the Hayward Gallery show opened in 1968, her soft sculptures of recognisable cultural figures had established her as a distinct voice within pop art, one whose methods were tied to craft traditions that the movement’s male figures had largely ignored. That year also brought a Grammy Award, shared with Peter Blake, for the album cover design that had been completed the year before.

• 4. Building the Pepper Cover

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  Gallery owner Robert Fraser was the person who suggested to The Beatles that they commission Blake and Haworth to design the cover for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The original concept was to show the band in their new Northern brass band uniforms, as though appearing at an official ceremony in a park.

  For the crowd gathering at this imaginary event, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison, along with Haworth, Blake, and Fraser himself, each submitted lists of characters they wanted present. Blake and Haworth then cut life-size black-and-white photographs of all approved characters, pasted them onto hardboard, and Haworth hand-tinted each one.

  Haworth contributed several cloth dummies of her own to the assembly, including one of her Old Lady figures and a Shirley Temple doll wearing a “Welcome The Rolling Stones” sweater. The flower-bed lettering that spells out the band’s name across the front of the image was her idea, drawn from the municipal flower-clock in Hammersmith, West London.

  In 1968, she and Blake received the Grammy Award for Best Album Cover in the Graphic Arts category for that design. The cover remained one of the most discussed images in pop music, and decades later it would serve as the direct source material for a large-scale public artwork that Haworth would build in Utah.

• 5. School, Family, and the Page

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  In 1979, Haworth founded The Looking Glass School near Bath, Somerset, an arts-and-crafts primary and middle school. That same year she separated from Peter Blake and began her life with the writer Richard Severy.

  Over the following two decades, raising a family took precedence over exhibition-making. She and Severy had children together, and the household also included stepdaughters. Six of Severy’s books for young readers carried her illustrations, published under the name Karen Haworth: Mystery Pig in 1983, Unicorn Trap in 1984, Rat’s Castle in 1985, High Jinks in 1986, Burners and Breakers in 1987, and Sea Change in 1987.

  She also designed five covers for the 1981 Methuen Arden Shakespeare editions, including Richard III, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Henry the Fifth, and Coriolanus. Her own art books for children followed in the 1990s: Paint in 1993, Collage in 1994, and Painting and Sticking in 1995, the last co-authored with her mother Miriam Haworth.

  During the 1970s, she and Blake had both been members of the Brotherhood of Ruralists, a loose collective that also included Ann and Graham Arnold, Annie and Graham Ovenden, and David Inshaw. Two solo exhibitions at Gimpel fils in London, held in the mid-1990s, signaled that her gallery career was reasserting itself after the family years.

• 6. Utah and the Art Shack

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  A 1997 Churchill Fellowship, specially designated as the Robert Fraser Award, took Haworth to the United States to study American quilt-making. She settled in Sundance, Utah, where she founded the Art Shack Studios and Glass Recycling Works and co-founded what was then called the Sundance Mountain Charter School, later renamed the Soldier Hollow Charter School.

  From that base, her exhibition career resumed with international reach. Solo shows followed at the Mayor Gallery in London in 2006, Wolverhampton Art Gallery in 2007, and the Galerie du Centre in Paris in 2008. She was also included in a series of retrospective surveys of pop art, among them “Pop Art UK” in Modena in 2004, “Pop Art! 1956-1968” in Rome in 2007, and “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968” in Philadelphia in 2009.

  Her work entered permanent collections on several continents, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Museum Folkwang in Essen, and the Sao Paulo Museum of Modern Art in Brazil.

  The fellowship that had brought her back to the United States also set the stage for the most ambitious civic project of her career, one that would put her back in conversation with the image she had built in 1967.

• 7. SLC Pepper

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  In 2004, Haworth began work on SLC PEPPER, a mural measuring 50 feet by 30 feet on a wall in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. The work was conceived as an updated version of the Sgt. Pepper’s album cover, and Haworth described the original as an icon ready for the iconoclast.

  Her stated intention was to turn the original inside out, with ethnic and gender balancing and an evaluation for contemporary relevance. Together with more than thirty local, national, and international artists spanning multiple generations, she assembled a new cast of what she called heroes and heroines of the 21st century, rendered in stencil graffiti, replacing every figure from the original cover.

  Only the Beatles’ jackets remained, preserved as metal cut-outs with head and hand holes so that visitors could step in and become part of the piece by taking souvenir photographs. The first phase of construction finished in 2005, and the project was designed to remain open-ended, with local artists continuing to add to it over time.

  The mural brought Haworth’s lifelong preoccupations together in a single outdoor space: the logic of the film set surrogate, the critique of which figures get included in a canon, and the craft traditions she had wielded at the Slade as a form of competition with the male students around her. A 2019-20 retrospective titled “Jann Haworth: Close Up” at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester gathered those threads across six decades of work.