Janie Paul

Bio

I was born in 1947 and grew up in Concord MA and Palo Alto California. I received a BA in Painting from Bennington College, an MA in Painting from Hunter College and a PhD in Art Education from New York University. During the twenty years I lived in New York as a working and exhibiting artist, I taught at the Parsons School of Design and developed and taught community based classes for children at the Brooklyn Museum. I was also an artist in residence in schools in Harlem, Hell’s Kitchen and Brooklyn through the Studio in a School Program. In 1995 I moved to Ann Arbor and am now an Associate Professor at the School of Art and Design and the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan. My position at the University of Michigan has allowed me to maintain a practice as a studio artist and a community based artist, working with incarcerated people and children in underserved Detroit schools. My work as a painter is both influenced by my community work and serves as a source for it.

I exhibit my work regularly at the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City and in various other galleries in New York, New England and Michigan. My artists’ book, The River based on text by Thoreau, has been collected by major special collections libraries around the country, including the Houghton Library at Harvard University and the John Hay Library at Brown University.

My primary educational work has been to develop a pedagogy that develops the capacity of visual meaning-creation as a vehicle for social change. I have co-curated the thirteen annual Exhibitions of Art by Michigan Prisoners, which brings art from about 40 prisons to campus each year. I have been a leader in the creation and development of the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), which is a national model for prison arts work. In this work, I have collaborated since 1995 with Buzz Alexander, professor of English at the University of Michigan. PCAP is a group of students, former students and faculty at the University of Michigan, and formerly incarcerated people committed to original work in the arts in Michigan correctional facilities. We facilitate art, writing and theater workshops in adult prisons and juvenile facilities, organize an annual exhibition of art by Michigan prisoners, and work with people coming out of prisons and juvenile facilities.