Janet Kawada is a sculptor, fiber artist, teacher and activist who uses the power of art as a tool for community engagement. A lifetime Boston area resident, she, for 25 years, taught generations of new artists in the Fiber Department at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Through sculpture and installations, Kawada explores community in all its permutations: family, students, fellow artists and urban neighbors.
Kawada attended MassArt as an undergraduate and maintains strong ties to the institution. “I had so many great teachers and mentors at MassArt” she commented, “like Marilyn Pappas, Janna Longacre and Ann Wessmann.” After joining the Fiber Department faculty herself, she taught many different approaches to fiber art, including surface design and flexible structures. “A fiber teacher at that time had to have a very broad way of looking at, interpreting, and then teaching ‘fiber,’” she mused. “Fiber as a medium became more and more visible and important in the world of fine art, blurring lines between art and craft.”
She became interested in yurts as symbolic and sculptural forms while teaching “Flexible Structures.” A yurt is a portable home which can house several people, a family and needs a team to assemble. The structure uses a folded array of wooden struts surrounded by thick, felted blankets which are bound together. Kawada traveled to Mongolia in 2015 and stayed in several types of yurts — very different, she noted, from tourist yurts in this country. In Mongolia, yurts are plain on the outside, but rich with decoration, rugs and furniture inside. As a wife, mother and grandmother within a blended family, she has had occasion to deeply reflect on the meanings of community, immigration and collective endeavors: the yurt became a focal point for her thinking, as a symbol of group effort, and a family’s shelter that is at once permanent and portable.