British-American pop artist Jann Haworth — best known for co-creating The Beatles’ "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band" album cover — gave a guest lecture at the BYU Museum of Art on Thursday, Nov. 16.
Haworth spoke about her multimedia art career: her love of making donuts out of fabric, co-creating The Beatles’ album cover by making life-size models of the Beatles’ heroes, designing murals all over Salt Lake City and the giant charm bracelet on display in the BYU Museum of Art’s exhibition "Counterpoint."
Because Haworth works in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms, she’s able to have a lot of fun with her art.
“A lot of my work has … double layers,” Haworth said. “So, there’s … a humorous level or a spiky level or a troublesome level.”
Speaking about the charm bracelets she enjoys making out of fabric, Haworth said, “The idea of the charm bracelets is it’s really like a kind of three-dimensional comic strip … You’re memorializing things that have happened in your life.”
"French Charm Bracelet" is one of these bracelets, and the MOA has acquired it as part of the exhibition "Counterpoint."
“It’s great to have such a prominent artist (come),” Liz Donakey, the museum educator over the "Counterpoint" exhibition, said. “People can see her art here, up in Salt Lake City, and they can also see it on a global scale.”
Haworth has art in galleries such as the National Portrait Gallery in London, England, but Utahns can enjoy her work right here in their own state, too. Haworth spoke about the huge murals she worked on in Salt Lake City.
One of these was modeled after the work she did for The Beatles and is titled "SLC Pepper," but another prominent one was created for the 2020 celebration for women’s voting rights. The piece features important women from throughout the world’s history and is a collaborative piece with many other artists.
“It originally had 250 images on it,” Haworth said. “It now has swollen to be about 350 and is now installed in the Salt Lake Community College.”
Justin Johnson, a student at Salt Lake Community College, said he attended the lecture to complete a class assignment.
“I was glad to have the opportunity to do this,” Johnson said. “She just has the mind of an artist — very, very brilliant.”
At the end of the lecture, a Q&A was held. “We’re striving to connect with the public and our community,” Donakey said. “It gives our audience an opportunity to meet living artists as well as ask them questions.”
Haworth said she thinks one of the biggest lessons she learned from making The Beatles’ album cover is that, like a picture that Hubble took of space or that Rosalind Franklin took of DNA, art can put us into different universes.
Several questions were asked about how to deal with the challenges of being an artist, from motivation to making an income.
“It is a hard road,” Haworth acknowledged. “I think you do have a battle with it. But then there’s this moment … where you’re like ‘yes!’ and you get all excited about it. And that’s what you live for … that moment that something really, really ignites.”
As part of her closing remarks, Haworth advised artists to “do it for the love of the art.”