Janet Echelman

Janet Echelman is an artist and founder of Studio Echelman whose large-scale aerial fiber sculptures merge art, architecture, engineering, material science, and public space. Her installations have transformed urban spaces across five continents, and she has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Visual Arts.

Public Art Reopens Erased Histories Through Civic Imagination

At the Aspen Ideas Festival, artists Walter Hood, Janet Echelman and Glenn Kaino argued that imagination is not an ornamental artistic faculty but a civic practice, one that lets Americans contest official memory, inhabit public space differently and imagine plural futures. In a conversation moderated by Megan O’Grady, they described public art as most powerful when it resists fixed interpretation, draws viewers into bodily experience and keeps alive forms of attention that metrics, politics and technology tend to flatten.

The Aspen InstituteJul 2, 202621 min read