The acclaimed US-born Pop artist Jann Haworth sees Work in Progress—the mural project she has been working on since 2016 with her artist daughter Liberty Blake—as a reckoning for the lack of women in Haworth’s best-known piece, the legendary cover of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967, co-created with her then husband Peter Blake and the photographer Michael Cooper). It is also, she told The Art Newspaper in 2023, a statement for the under-representation of women in general.
When Joseph Fowler, head of arts and culture at the World Economic Forum (WEF), saw seven panels from Work in Progress, which had been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in London in 2023, he commissioned Haworth and Blake to make two new panels for the series, to be shown at the 2025 annual meeting of the WEF in Davos and to include images of women who have been associated with the meeting’s arts and culture programme. The subjects in the new panels include the American ballet dancer Misty Copeland and the Beninese-French singer-songwriter Angélique Kidjo. The panels are being hung at Davos with new reproductions of six earlier panels in a series that now stands at 24 pºanels and counting.
For Fowler, the Work in Progress panels are an artistic response to the gender gap report released annually since 2006 by the WEF. The 2024 report, released last June, Fowler tells The Art Newspaper, “gave a very sobering figure of 134 years before the gender gap will be closed. And I’m constantly trying to find ways to articulate gender equity through creative expression. [In 2024] it was with Jude Kelly, founder of the WOW Foundation and the exhibition entitled The Hope Brigade. The year before that, I collaborated with Immy Humes and presented the exhibition The Only Woman in the Room, featuring [a] series of group portraits, [found photographs] featuring one lone woman. And this year it is the panels from Work in Progress.” Haworth and Blake’s work is, Fowler says, “a really beautiful piece of art, very powerful and honours over 100 groundbreaking women, both historical and contemporary, who have driven gender equity both publicly and privately.”.
Jann Hanworth was born in 1942 in Los Feliz, Los Angeles
Robert King
Fowler also focuses on the importance and value of the community base of Haworth and Blake’s project. The images of women have been created through a stencilling process involving more than 250 other women over the past nine years, many of them amateur artists, with Blake working on the collages and Haworth overseeing the training and output of the community artists.
The pair are excited about the commission, Haworth tells The Art Newspaper. “It came out of the blue. Joseph Fowler… went to see the National Portrait Gallery, and he said he was just captivated by the [Work in Progress] mural there.” Haworth is intrigued by whether, depending on how the panels are finally hung, people will be racing past them to get into the conference hall or not. “It usually stops people because [the scale of the panels are] a shock. It should be one of those things that you’re both confused and curious about. So, that’s been one of the things that is certainly true with the National Portrait Gallery and anywhere we’ve hung it, that the people look at it and immediately want a key”—which Haworth and Blake have duly provided for the WEF Davos panels.
Confronted by the gender gap
More than 60 years after Haworth broke on to the London art scene with her work in 4 Young Artists at the Institute of Contemporary Art, in 1963—including full-figure soft sculptures—she continues to champion women artists and to experiment with formats.
One new project is a fantastical graphic-novel reimagining of Lewis Carroll’s Alice through the Looking Glass, which she calls a “folly”, but something she felt compelled to write. Here, Alice is a 60-year-old man, and the story is set in Santa Monica and ends up on Pacific Ocean Park Pier, with guest appearances from the film director Alfred Hitchcock and the actor Robert Mitchum.
The other is a graphic-memoir dissection of the Hollywood of her 1940s childhood, when her Academy Award-winning art director father, Ted Haworth, often took her to watch filming. She is devising it with Stephen Dark, a writer with an encyclopaedic knowledge of film noir, and hopes to dissect the lives of larger than life Hollywood characters.
“I met these crazy people,” Haworth says. I mean, I met Marilyn [Monroe] and I met [Marlon] Brando and I was friends with Tony Curtis and Lili St Cyr, who was in The Naked and the Dead. I mean, these kind of strange, wonderful people, Kim Novak… And the arc of their life is something that I could see.”
The second panel by Jann Haworth and Liberty Blake from their ongoing Work in Progress
Liberty Blake and Jann Haworth, Courtesy of the artists
In 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, she observed the gender gap that she addresses today in Work in Progress. “I could see these actresses getting older and not being cast any more,” Haworth recounts. “And they’re talking about it. How they disintegrated and how the walk of fame along Hollywood Boulevard has people that are [now] forgotten.” In both graphic writing projects, she is working with charcoal, a fragile medium to match the fleeting nature of stardom: “All these ghosts are things that are still alive in my head… It’s the disintegration that I’m interested in.”
