Jane Kaplowitz Telephone, 2023

Jane Kaplowitz (b. Brooklyn, NY, 1949) paintings often use fragments of text from invitations cards, art dinner menus and other flotsam and jetsam that surrounds art exhibitions, openings and other cultural correspondence. As the wife of Robert Rosenblum and through her own circle of artist peers, Kaplowitz from a very young age was ingratiated into the most illustrious circles of artists and thinkers. She has kept an extensive archive of she and her husband’s travels and immersive experiences in the high cultural milieu, turning this ephemera into the very substance of her art. Not only do these mementos historicize these given events, the streams of proper names from the most famous of artists to those forgotten cult figures of the downtown culturati are enshrined in her works. When read as a whole, Kaplowitz’s oeuvre is both a lifelong self-portrait and an ethnographic record of other lives lived, careers lost, and the passing of tastes within this rarefied social bubble of the art world. Born in Brooklyn in 1949, Kaplowitz began her formal training at Pratt Institute where she received a B.F.A. in 1971 and continued her graduate studies at the Art Institute of Chicago where she received her M.F.A. in 1973.