This FACE has a new home, gifted to a wonderful friend who helped me design and build the shelves on which I've been displaying the FACES made over the last few years.
I started this blog in 2008, after living through the mess and destruction the George W. Bush administration had made http://janetvanfleet.blogspot.com/2008/11/elections-over-time-for-new-work.html
Little did I know that it was going to get even worse, and not that many years down the road.
I have been posting on Instagram for the last several years and so haven't used this blog much, but now that Meta is in bed with the new administration, I don't feel I can be there anymore. This is a shame, because it was wonderful to be connected with artists all over the world. Maybe this is a case of "cutting off your nose to spite your face". We'll see...
In September of 2023 I put up my large free-standing installation, A Guided Tour of Dante's Inferno on my land in Cabot, Vermont. You can see some images on Instagram here. I had it open briefly for people to come visit and then I offered to give individual pieces and parts of the installation to people who were interested. I cut up the painted Styrofoam bases that the figures were mounted on to make individual units that could be taken away. Many people nearby in central Vermont took pieces, and during the summer of 2024 my friend Karen Thomsen from Denmark and Dusty Haller from Rhode Island came and each claimed a piece. Here are some images they sent me of the pieces in their new homes:
Karen took a Usurer from the 7th Circle and it is now in her apartment in Copenhagen:
Dusty took a Glutton from the 3rd Circle. Here it is on the "secretary" at her house:
I try to keep a record of where my work goes out into in the world here in this blog!
I haven't posted here on my blog for awhile, but if anyone's looking, I want to announce that I have been on Instagram since January, 2022 and that's where I'm posting current work and happenings. https://www.instagram.com/janetvanfleet/
Most recently, I've been working on a series of FACES that are mounted on black bases:
Two pieces were sold during the recent exhibit We the People at Green Tara Space in North Hero, in the Champlain Islands. They look pretty happy in their new home!
The piece in the previous post, SNOW, was sold in the silent auction at the Bennington Museum, bringing in $1,651, of which I will get half. I'm a bit sad to not see it anymore (as I didn't have it in the studio that long before delivering it to the museum), but people often ask me if I'm distressed about having work sold and gone. The answer is "No! My artwork is a bit like my children, and we want our children to grow up, possess their own lives, and make their way in the world, not keep them exclusively tethered to us." I make work for the world, and am delighted when it finds its way to a new home.
Have a look at my new website, and the images of all the pieces in this series of People: https://www.janetvanfleet.com/people There are new ones coming along all the time!
