Jeanne Heifetz Answers
Thank you to Jeanne for answering some of my questions. I love the materiality and mapping quality of this new work.
Creatives in your ancestry who might have influenced you?
My parents met at the High School of Music & Art, but both of them were musicians. My mother worked in cultural and educational exchange for the State Department, but she also took classes at the Art Students’ League. Her grandfather had been a goldsmith who made beautiful Art Nouveau jewelry with a lot of delicate filigree and repoussé work. I guess if there’s a gene for doing detailed work on a tiny scale I inherited it from him. My mother’s best friend from high school was the Israeli painter Nora Frenkel, whose work filled the apartment I grew up in. My father was passionate about photography, and taught it out of our apartment. We had a darkroom at home where he (and later I) developed both color and black-and-white film and prints.
Name 5 favorite artists that turn you on…and why?
That’s a tough one. I keep a spreadsheet of artists whose work I admire (and share on Facebook) and it’s got almost 900 names on it. But I also have keywords on the spreadsheet to help me remember each artist’s work, and some of the most frequent keywords are “obsessive,” “cellular,” “biomorphic,” “mapping,” “accretion,” “layering,” and “installation.” So that gives you an idea of what floats my boat.
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