- Wired
WIRED
Making Light of Tragedy
January/February 2016“I am drawn to urban spaces, because I think that art should be part of life.”Artist Janet Echelman created otherworldly aerial sculptures. Composed of hand-splices and knotted lightweight fibres, they’re colored by projected light. “They’re about the complexity of interaction that we cannot predict.”
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- Public Art Review
PUBLIC ART REVIEW
Discovering the Unknown
by Daniel Tucker, Spring/Summer 2015“My early drawings and paintings were about line, language, and movement. What was exciting to me when I first discovered sculpting was that those lines became physical.”Janet Echelman is an artist who defies categorization. Her work is at the intersection of fine art, ancient craft, cutting-edge technology, architecture, and public art. Starting out, she was rejected by every art school she applied to. Today she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Aspen Institute’s Henry Crown Fellowship, and a Harvard University Loeb Fellowship.
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- Echelman Boston Globe 2015
THE BOSTON GLOBE
Sculpture Fills Greenway Skies
by Malcolm Gay, May, 4, 2015This is very much about handcraft and ancient traditions as well as about the newest technology.The sculpture is a study in contrasts, not only between its own strength and flexibility but also between the rigidity of the built environment and what Echelman deems it’s “monumental softness”.
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- Art Scope
ARTSCOPE
Knitting Together the Urban Fabric
by Donna Dodson, May/June 2015While Echelman has created these awe-inspiring works of art all over
the world, she has never had a chance to build one in her hometown, until now.World-renowned artist Janet Echelman is creating an aerial installation for Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway to be unveiled on May 11, 2015. Her iconic works of art have been exhibited internationally, but never before on the East Coast. Her current Greenway project promises to place Boston on the map as a destination for world-class public art.
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- Smithsonian
SMITHSONIAN
High Wire
by Max Kutner, November, 2014When I’m Surrounded by concrete buildings like tall industrial boxes, my own physical presence feels so completely displaced.Echelman, a painter, turned to sculpture in 1997 when she traveled to India and her paints were lost in transit; she began making shapes with local fishermen’s nets.
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- Echelman NYT Glow 2013
NEW YORK TIMES
Glow Art Festival Illuminates a Beach
by Ian Lovett, Sept 29, 2013I just love seeing all the people changing it; everone is sculpting it.It took an entire week for Janet Echelman – along with a team that included a composer, landscape architects, lighting technicians and a bulldozer crew – to construct her art installation in the sand along the beach…
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- Sculpture 2011
SCULPTURE
Sculpting Urban Airspace
by Regina Frank, September 2011It defies gravity as it dances and flutters, choreographed by currents of air.If your eye becomes entangled by the beauty of a huge fishing net cast into the vast blue of the sky, it has probably been caught in a work by Janet Echelman. Originally a painter, Echelman has been working with nets since a residency in India. Left without materials when her shipment of supplies went astray, she turned this lucky mishap into inspiration as she watched local fishermen at work.
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- Metropolis 2005
METROPOLIS
Motion and Change
by Lara Kristin Lentini, June 2015I wanted the piece to have multiple layers of reference to the local visual language…“I like limitations and parameters,” artist Janet Echelman says. “I find them inspiring.” A veteran of public sculpture projects, she is accustomed to such challenges as less-than-ideal sites, inflexible budgets, and unrealistic expectations.
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