Jan Harrison is a visionary artist, whose paintings, sculptures, and installations involve empathy with the animal nature, spirit, and the animal/human interface. She speaks and sings in a language, Animal Tongues, which she performs. Her work is considered to be an influence in the investigation of the animal/human interface in art.

Jan Harrison was born in West Palm Beach, Florida, and has lived in Georgia, California, and Ohio. In 1989 she moved from Cincinnati to New York's Hudson Valley.

Her art has been in over one hundred solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally, including Animal.Anima.Animus, which opened in Finland and was exhibited in Holland, Canada, and at PS1 in New York.

Arcana Mundi, a monograph, was published in 2001 by Station Hill Press. In 2003, a chapter regarding her art was published in the book, In The Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Art, Linda Weintraub, D.A.P., New York, NY. In 2010 an article and interview about her work was published in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, New York, NY. 

"Jan Harrison beckons viewers to embark on a voyage. But instead of leaving home to explore exotic sites and sounds, we are guided into equally foreign territory—our innermost selves. We journey downward, circumventing our personalities and our individual life stories, passing our accumulated recollections and our acquired attitudes, crossing beyond spoken and written histories and even beyond human ancestry. Ultimately we disembark in the wondrous galaxy we carry within each gene. Its constellations are measured in units of shudders, murmurs, gasps, and shivers.

On this primal level, we discover our common animal ancestry, a vestigial remnant here awakened and made observable as pastel drawings, porcelain sculptures, and recorded voices."    

 Linda Weintraub, excerpts from essay, Genus Fusion

 

"Occasionally an artist embodies the full manifold, a many-folding mind field, a replete and monstrous sheath turning out an underside of mind and, as Blake said, “the infinite which was hid.”

This is liminal being with highwire intensity — and no more human vs. animal, and especially no more diminution of the animal as something sub-human, rather than the essential reality of any other in the natural mystery of its primacy.

Somehow its magic is to release us from our dying images, to set us out on our journey of the precariously beautiful, with its unlimiting energy and self-secret identity, and we are, to transpose Yeats, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born."

George Quasha, excerpts from essay, Crossing Over to Jan Harrison

 

"Deeply personal and pioneering work…"  Paul Smart