page_title: Jan Serr
section_title: Themes and Exhibitions
hierarchical_section_title: Jan Serr / Themes and Exhibitions
caption_attribution_description: English: Three Generations, Xian (Great Mosque), photograph by Jan Serr
context_page_description: Jan Serr is an American visual artist who produces a wide range of art including oil paintings, drawings, photographs and prints such as monotypes, lithographs, and etchings.
context_section_description: Landscapes are significant in Serr’s oeuvre. Works from the Long Point Bay series are held in major Canadian collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario. The Sky Over Land series was exhibited in solo shows at Marlborough Godard Gallery in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and the Wustum Art Museum in Racine, Wisconsin. Works from the series Trees in Water, Driftless, Downstream, and Leaves and Branches were shown as part of the U.S. Department of State Art in Embassies Program.
  A solo exhibition, Jan Serr: Twenty-Year Retrospective: Landscape & Figurative Paintings, was held at the Rahr West Art Museum in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, in 1985.
  Representational figures and self-portraits are a substantial part of Serr’s work, explored through painting, drawing, and print mediums. About Face was a solo, forty-year survey of self-portraits and figurative work shown at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts in 2011. Summer Dances, exhibited by the Museum of Wisconsin Art in 2014, is a recent series representing dancers in motion.
  Two books of photographs, "Then & Now: China" (ISBN 978-0-932282-01-9) and "Smoke & Mirrors: India" (ISBN 978-0-932282-17-0) were published January 2017.  These are large format books, 10.5x10.5 in (26 x 26 cm).  Serr wrote a preface for each book, detailing when and how the photographs were taken. "I was going to be working in the manner of a group of photographers that I greatly admire: Saul Leiter, Helen Levitt, and Garry Winogrand. . . I would not be the studio photographer, but I would be the candid, spontaneous, quick, prolific street photographer."  The preface also addresses the relationship, and sometimes tension, of her work as a photographer and a painter.  Nishant Batsha, Indian-American scholar, wrote an Introduction to Smoke & Mirrors titled "Five Travelers": "The history of India is in many ways a history of travelers."
  The Warehouse, a Milwaukee museum, presented "Jan Serr: A Painter's Photographs of India," September 13-December 13, 2019, Serr's first public exhibition of her photographs.  Some of the photographs were of northern India, included in "Smoke & Mirrors: India", while a new body of photographs of southern India were also presented.  A catalog "The Elephant's Eye" (ISBN 978-0-932282-21-7), a Plumb Press publication edited by Serr and Kate Hawley, was published in conjunction with the exhibition.
caption: Three Generations, Xian (Great Mosque), photograph by Jan Serr
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