Janet Abrams: Balancing Acts is on view at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, Santa Fe
January 30 – May 2, 2026
Zane Bennett Contemporary Art announces Balancing Acts, the first solo exhibition of Cranbrook Academy of Art alumna and renowned art, architecture and design critic Janet Abrams.
Comprising over a dozen sculptures that put clay in conversation with diverse materials—including steel, copper, rawhide, rubber, and wood—the show tracks Abrams’s evolving studies of balance, gravity, and precariousness. Drawing inspiration from the work of 20th-century sculptors such as Alexander Calder, Ruth Duckworth, Lucio Fontana, Eva Hesse, Barbara Hepworth, and Ruth Vollmer, her sculptures set opacity and weight in contrast to translucency and levity and reject the convention that ceramic artifacts must be earth- (or pedestal-) bound. Forms and materials are brought together in compositions that seem to harness kinetic energy, conveying a frisson of risk—a condition she describes as “a metaphor for the precariousness of life itself.”
Early works from the exhibition, such as Vicissitude and Involution, show her interest in flowing, organic clay forms resting on rectilinear supports: dangling from a cantilevered copper bar or hanging over a horizontal surface. Later works, like Gather and Kernel, set the natural hues of high- and low-fire clay bodies against semi-translucent materials, allowing an interplay between the obduracy of solid objects and the muted light that filters through rawhide or urethane rubber. Zane Bennett gallery director Carina Evangelista notes:
Abrams merges her deep knowledge of architecture and design with her fascination for materials, ignited by touching clay slip at a crafts school during a conference in the early 2000s. That tactile epiphany led her to pivot from her long-established career as a writer to become a practicing artist. Visual witticism runs through her vocabulary of ceramic elements—rods, loops, hoops, tapered or teardrop forms—while their armatures in wood, metal, rawhide and rubber seem like responses to structural riddles. Balancing Acts presents an array of objects that hang, perch, or float on their bases, illustrating how the weight and fragility of clay can serve as its own fulcrum. Within the architecture of precarity and acrobatics with gravity of Abrams’s work is the spirit of play.
Abrams rediscovered clay in her late 40s during her directorship of the University of Minnesota Design Institute in Minneapolis (2000–2008). Evening classes at Northern Clay Center confirmed her enthusiasm for ceramics, leading to an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. There she experimented with clay and unconventional materials, making installations out of spun cotton candy, hot glue strung with dead houseflies, egg yolk in panty hose, and honey dripping through vintage kitchen tools. These forays laid the foundation for Abrams’s subsequent practice, which moves freely between a variety of materials and tools, using fabrication techniques acquired at Santa Fe Community College. Abrams views Balancing Acts as the corollary materialization of her ongoing interest in the relationship between the “natural” and the “technological,” in the creation of the hand-made and attention to tactility in an era of digital disembodiment, and in narratives of finding one’s foothold during displacement or diasporic drift.
About the artist
Janet Abrams, born London, 1959, lives and works in Santa Fe, NM.
Abrams came to studio art after a long career as a journalist, critic, and academic, with stints as staff writer for Blueprint and I.D. International Design magazines, editor at the Netherlands Design Institute, director of the University of Minnesota Design Institute, and teacher in the MFA and MArch programs at Yale University, Parsons School of Design, and the University of New Mexico.
In 2004, while running the Design Institute, she was invited to a conference on “Craft and Design: Hand, Mind, and the Creative Process” at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, which changed the course of her career. During a conference break, she found her way to the ceramics studio, dipped her hand in a bucket of clay slip, and became captivated by the material. Four years later, she entered Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan for an MFA in ceramics, where she experimented with materials beyond clay and discovered artists whose inquiries into physical phenomena such as light, gravity, and atmospheric conditions would inform her own practice.
In 2014, a year after relocating to Santa Fe, Abrams won the SITE Santa Fe’s SPREAD 5.0 competition for visual artists. She used the award to establish her studio and take sculpture courses at Santa Fe Community College.
She holds a BS in architecture (London University) and a PhD in architectural history, theory and criticism (Princeton University). She has had residencies at A.I.R. Vallauris in France, the European Ceramic Work Centre in the Netherlands, and MacDowell in New Hampshire. She has participated in workshops at Anderson Ranch, Banff Centre, Haystack, and Ox-Bow School of Art. Her essays have appeared in artist monographs, exhibition catalogs, and periodicals such as Ceramic Review, Crafts, Domus, frieze, New York Times, and Southwest Contemporary. A collection of her writings, Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me A Bauhaus: Profiles in Architecture and Design, was published in 2020. That same year, she co-curated and designed/built the website for Quartz Inversion, a showcase of work made by over sixty international ceramic artists during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Contact
info@zanebennettgallery.com
Zane Bennett Contemporary Art
435 S Guadalupe St. fl. 2
Santa Fe, NM 87501
United States
Installation views by Kim Cook. Images of individual works by Marylene Mey. Courtesy of Zane Bennett Contemporary Art
Captions
- Janet Abrams, Augury, 2016, Stoneware and copper, 25 x 18 x 12 in / 63.5 x 45.7 x 30.5 cm
- Janet Abrams, Gather, 2017, Rawhide and unglazed ceramic (low-fired micaceous red and micaceous white clay, high-fired Black Mountain Sculpture Clay), 21 x 39 x 6 in / 53.3 x 99.1 x 15.2 cm
- Janet Abrams, Homage to C.S., 2017, Glazed ceramic with manganese dioxide wash, Iris blue glaze (matte), and orange glaze (gloss), 15 1/2 x 15 x 10 in / 39.4 x 38.1 x 25.4 cm
- Janet Abrams, Kernel, 2018, Stoneware, urethane, poplar, and gold leaf, 11 x 9 x 8 in / 27.9 x 22.9 x 20.3 cm. Base: 4 x 13 x 6 in / 10.2 x 33 x 15.2 cm
- Janet Abrams, Vicissitude, 2010, Stoneware, copper, plywood, and steel, Stoneware: 36 x 24 x 3 in / 91.4 x 61 x 7.6 cm. Copper: 4 1/2 x 24 x 4 1/2 in / 11.4 x 61 x 11.4 cm
- Janet Abrams, Sostenuto, 2010, Unglazed, bisque-fired stoneware, poplar, leather, and brass piano pedals, Stoneware: 20 x 38 x 6 in / 50.8 x 96.5 x 15.2 cm. Poplar: 10 x 72 x 10 in / 25.4 x 182.9 x 25.4 cm. Leather: 60 in / 152.4 cm. Brass piano pedals: 7 in / 17.8 cm
- Janet Abrams, Orbital, 2016-2025, Ceramic (Black Mountain Sculpture Clay) and pine, Ellipse: 7 x 22 x 2 in / 17.8 x 55.9 x 5.1 cm. Base: 5 1/2 x 24 1/2 x 5 1/2 in / 14 x 62.2 x 14 cm
- Janet Abrams, Pele’s Tear, 2018-2025, High-fired, unglazed stoneware (Death Valley sculpture clay), 22 x 8 x 12 in / 55.9 x 20.3 x 30.5 cm
- Janet Abrams, They, 2015-2026, Stoneware and rawhide, 15 x 14 x 16 in / 38.1 x 35.6 x 40.6 cm
