- published: 31 Aug 2015
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Jann Haworth (born 1942) is an American Pop artist. A pioneer of soft sculpture, she is best known as the co-creator of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover.
Haworth was born in 1942 and raised in Hollywood, California. Her mother Miriam Haworth was a distinguished ceramist, printmaker, and painter. Her father, Ted Haworth, was an Academy Award-winning art director. Haworth acknowledges that much of her own work has been shaped by the early influences of her artistic parents.
After two years at UCLA, she moved to London, England in 1961. There she studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art and studio art at the Slade School of Fine Art. Haworth reveled in being a rebellious woman artist within a conservative, male-dominated institution like the Slade.
It was in these formative years at art school that her aesthetic sense was first established. She began experimenting with sewn and stuffed soft sculptures. She made still life items (flowers, doughnuts) and quickly progressed to her now iconic "Old Lady" doll and other life-sized figures. Her work often contained specific references to American culture and to Hollywood in particular, as is readily apparent in her dummies of Mae West, Shirley Temple and W.C. Fields.