Jan Haag (December 6,1933 - April 29, 2024)
We are saddened to share with you news of the passing of our beloved artist and dear friend Jan Haag.
After directing dozens of educational films for the John Tracy Clinic and the U.S. Department of Health, Haag rose to prominence as the founder of the Directing Workshop for Women at the American Film Institute. Attracting the support of Maya Angelou, Anne Bancroft, Joan Didion, Mathilde Krim, Lily Tomlin, Joanne Woodward, and many others, she broke the glass ceiling for women directors in the film industry.
Departing the American Film Institute in 1982, Haag returned to her roots as a writer and visual artist. Walking solo through India, Korea, China, Thailand, Nepal, Russia, Europe, and South America, she memorialized her travels in a series of free-form needlepoint diaries, later exhibited at the Seattle Asian Art Museum and international shows.
Jan Haag, Mukhra/Tukra/Chakradar.
“Over the years, working on these pieces has become one of my primary ways of understanding both the world and my experience of it,” she once said. “The works… transmit knowledge. Not only the powerful subjective awareness of light and color, but the pleasure associated with study— in this case, study of music, astronomy, mathematics, travel, archaeology and the iconographic, mystical and esoteric traditions of many cultures.”
One stitch at a time, Haag sundered the needlepoint medium's association with domestic craft and the antique to become one of contemporary adventure and exploration.
Jan Haag, The Ten Thaats.
Between 1975 and 2008, Jan Haag created twenty-three needlepoint canvases, working on some of these simultaneously. One work took ten years to complete. The more complex of these canvases required thousands of hours of application. An accomplished painter and poet, Haag wrote of the textile art medium:
“Compared with the roughhouse immediacy of painting and sculpture, one can cite many a rug, tapestry, piece of stitchery which took a year to make or, at times, a decade. Back and back and back, millennia by millennia, the history and lore of weaving/stitchery recedes as we, at the near end of the time scale, proceed— cloth, grid arts, fractals and computer— into the future.”
Our condolences to her family and many friends.
Jan Haag, Palimpsest.