Queen of the Collaborators

From the outside, it’s easy to assume that the art-making process must be a solitary endeavor. The image of the artist holed up in a studio, wrestling to bring form to an internal concept or vision, is a durable one. But while Alexandria artist Janet Ahrens does work from a studio at the beautiful home she shares with her husband Carl, it’s the process of collaborating, both with other artists and with the community at large, that keeps her work evolving. 

An artist who cannot confine her creative impulses to a single medium, Janet is a natural collaborator, a serial investigator, and a pied piper whose passion for creation overflows the couple’s home studio to be amplified by River Oaks Square Arts Center, the downtown arts institution to which they both belong. Working in a startling diversity of genres and mediums, Janet and Carl Ahrens seem largely ungoverned by the normal laws of artistic physics. Intensely community-focused and relentlessly collaborative, the couple makes broadly appealing, thought-provoking art that reaches out to the viewer to make a connection. 

The Ahrens’ work ranges from fancifully framed mirrors and whimsical furniture to deconstructed busts and gargoyles, graceful life-sized standing figures, and monumental totem poles and altars. These they craft from all kinds of different materials, incorporating influences that include the forms of nature, classical architecture, religious iconography and animism, and cultural references from Mesoamerican to Asian. 

“Our art is all project-based,” Janet explained. “We work in whatever works for whatever project. I think them up and he can build whatever I think up.” Carl, her husband of twenty-four years, is her original collaborator. The owner of an Oakdale lumber company and a sculptor with a gift for seeing the creature within the wood, Carl shapes monumental wooden sculptures ranging from birds in flight to life-sized horses to totem poles. He figures out the structural puzzles required to build the pieces Janet sees in her mind’s eye. “She has great ideas,” he said in an interview for the LPB Art Rocks segment produced in conjunction with this article. “And she’s a perfectionist, and she can do anything with her hands.” 

But whether they’re working with wood, clay, concrete, or something else, what guides the Ahrens’ choice of medium is the message Janet wishes to convey. “To me there’s ‘parable art,’ art that tells a story or has a story to go with it; and then there’s ‘escape art,’ which is abstract, so you wouldn’t necessarily know the story behind it,” she said. “To me the escapism is in the thinking about it. You create a theme then ask yourself, ‘What would work the best for that theme?’ I like that process.” 

In 2003, when the Alexandria Museum of Art hosted the exhibition The Heart of Spain, a collection of religious antiquities on loan from institutions all over Spain, the Ahrens were asked to create original pieces for an opening gala. “I thought about how to combine Spanish art with Louisiana art,” she said, “so we cut cypress knees and made angels out of them.” More recently, River Oaks Square received a grant to create an installation piece for Manna House, a shelter feeding the homeless and operated by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Alexandria. “I thought about what homeless people would want to look at,” Janet explained, “and decided to make a ‘tree of life,’ with a woman as the trunk and do it all out of recycled material. So everything is made out of crushed tin cans and metal, all recycled from the Manna House.” 

Once a concept has emerged, Janet likes working with groups of artists to make it a reality. “I believe everybody has a gift, and when you combine them, something wonderful comes out,” she noted. One striking example: a 2015 River Oaks exhibit named Guess Who is Coming to Dinner, for which teams of artists working in different disciplines collaborated to create elaborate table-scapes, each illustrating a different theme. Each table setting was assembled entirely from handmade pieces—from the linens to the flatware, serving vessels, cutlery, vases, lighting and related wall art. The result: arresting visual symphonies of color, shape, and grace that not only amplified each participating artist’s achievement, but did so through a concept to which every viewer could relate. After all, everybody eats. 

“I believe everybody has a gift, and when you combine them, something wonderful comes out.” 

Conner Burns, the nationally renowned ceramic artist from Natchez, has known Janet and Carl for decades and collaborates with them regularly. “Janet’s work has this playful whimsy that pulls you in,” he said, “and you can’t help but smile. She works in a variety of materials and often at a scale that commands the viewer to stop and take a look. And upon further analysis the details and dynamic qualities of her art engage you on a more personal level.” 

Burns noted that Janet’s other talent is an ability to live in two worlds. “Oftentimes artists are great at doing art, but less effective at organizing, fundraising, and communicating with the big picture,” he noted. “But Janet can do it all. She can make great artwork, but she’s also able to connect with people.”

Both Burns and Janet, and many other artists in Alexandria and beyond, are quick to credit River Oaks Square Arts Center as a jewel in the city’s creative crown. “It is a most wonderful place—a community in itself, and a very fertile environment for the cross-pollination of ideas,” noted Janet. Occupying a city block in downtown Alexandria’s Cultural District, the center is built around a Queen Anne Revival-style home donated to the city by the Bolton family in 1979, with the stipulation that it be used solely to further the arts. 

In 1999, a fifteen-thousand-square-foot annex was built alongside, bringing River Oaks’ capacity to three gallery spaces and thirty-two artist’s studios, an on-site arts academy, full-scale ceramics studio, and rental spaces. Pursuing its mission to promote contemporary visual art and fine crafts, River Oaks accommodates forty resident artists, presents twenty-four exhibits annually, and provides continuous art classes for adults and youth. “It has brought so many artists together, Janet said. “With studios open so you can wander in and out, you feed off one another.” 

Speaking of collaborative masterpieces, Janet is excited about an upcoming collaboration with world-renowned potter Randy Brodnax. Dallas-based Brodnax grew up in Alexandria and returns to teach classes at River Oaks regularly. “Randy knows I like the weird stuff, so he said, ‘Let’s do a gargoyle show!’ So I did one, and it looks just like that guy from The Goonies, with a creature on top of its head. I like the idea of getting a lot of people to do their own interpretation of a gargoyle.” Janet admitted that she’s always liked sculpting heads, “because I’m very interested in people and how they work,” she explained. “Often I’ll do [the heads] open to show what’s going on inside. In college I started out studying psychology, not art. I’m sure there’s some overlap. My dad always said I needed to be in art.”  

This month, Janet Ahrens will be the subject of a profile on LPB’s Art Rocks—the televised weekly showcase of Louisiana’s visual and performing arts hosted by Country Roads publisher James Fox-Smith. For a look inside the Ahrens’ studio and spectacular garden, tune in on October 14 at 8:30 pm or October 15 at 5:30 pm. lpb.org/artrocks.

River Oaks Square Arts Center  

1330 Second Street

Alexandria, La.

riveroaksartscenter.com

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