Janet Echelman

About Janet

• When asked to describe her job in one sentence, she says: “I go to cities and create spaces where people can come together.”
• Her sculptural artworks are massive, soft, multi-layered forms made up of different kinds of fibers, often displayed in public spaces like parks or town squares.
• When she told her mother that she wanted to be an artist, her mom said, “That’s a great aspiration; now go make 100 paintings.”
• She said the message behind it was, “this is a great thing to aspire to, and I support you, but it’s going to take a lot of hard work and persistence.”
• She was rejected from all seven art schools she applied to, but she says that devising her own education in the arts ended up being much more authentic and fulfilling.
• She originally started out as a painter, but after college she took a trip to Bali, and when she tried to ship all of her paint supplies there, they got lost in the mail.
• As a result, she started looking around for new materials to use to create art, and she started making sculptures from the local fishermen’s nets.
• She gets a lot of her inspiration from nature, but she executes her vision at scale with help from computer science and engineering technologies.