Jan Marie Haag (néeSmith; December 6, 1933 – April 29, 2024) was an American filmmaker, artist and writer who founded the Directing Workshop for Women at the American Film Institute (AFI) and was known for her innovative contemporary needlepoint canvases and poetry.[1]
In Seattle, Haag managed poetry readings, an art gallery, and the Shakespeare Workshop for ABC Bookstore. As an actress, she performed in regional theaters during the 1950s and 1960s, and directed plays in Washington, Oregon and California. Haag has exhibited her work in West Coast museums, competitions, and galleries—including the Seattle Art Museum, the Frye Museum, the Otto Seligman Gallery, and the Woessner Gallery.
Between 1975 and 2008, Haag created twenty-three contemporary needlepoint canvases, working on some of these simultaneously. One work took ten years to complete. The more complex of these canvases required hundreds, sometimes thousands of hours of application. An accomplished painter and poet familiar with different mediums, Haag writes of the textile art medium: “Compared with the roughhouse immediacy of painting and sculpture, one can cite many a rug, tapestry, piece of stitchery which took a year to make or, at times, a decade. Back and back and back, millennia by millennia, the history and lore of weaving/stitchery recedes as we, at the near end of the time scale, proceed -- cloth, grid arts, fractals and computer -- into the future.”
Haag explained: “Over the years, working on these pieces has become one of my primary ways of understanding both the world and my experience of it. The works… transmit knowledge. Not only the powerful subjective awareness of light and color, but the pleasure associated with study -- in this case, study of music, astronomy, mathematics, travel, archaeology, and the iconographic, mystical and esoteric traditions of many cultures.”[7][8]
These textile pieces became a life’s work. Through determined experimentation and applying techniques and iconography learned from a lifetime of travel, including treks on foot alone through India, Korea, China, Thailand, Nepal, Russia and Europe, Haag would forever change the perceptions and possibilities of needlepoint.[9]Leonore Tawney admired Haag’s work and despite failing health traveled from New York to visit her exhibition at the Seattle Asian Art Museum.
In 1982, Haag retired from AFI to focus on her art and writing. She wrote thousands of poems and gave poetry readings in theaters, museums, libraries, galleries, and private salons. A limited edition of "Amanita Caesarea", a legend, with original drawings by Roger Landry, was published by Gallery Plus in Los Angeles. Haag wrote stories, novels, plays, film scripts, articles, essays, and a vast journal—the manuscripts of which are on deposit in Special Collections at the Blagg Huey Library of Texas Woman's University in Denton, TX. Haag's travel stories have appeared in four of the prize-winning Traveler's Tales series of books: India,A Woman's World,The Spiritual Gifts of Travel, and Spain. During a 1991 writer's fellowship at the Syvenna Foundation in Texas, Haag wrote a novel Cantalloc. In 1992, during a writer's fellowship at Blue Mountain Center in New York, she completed No Palms, a California/Texas novel centering on water rights, real estate fraud, and murder. After 50 years of research and study, in 2009, Haag published Jocasta, an original play based on the Oedipus myth seen from Jocasta's point of view. Ascesis, a 600-page volume of poetry, was published in 2014.
Personal life and death
Haag was married for ten years, 1957–68, to John Haag, Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Pennsylvania State University. Haag spent her last years in Shoreline, in the Seattle metropolitan area. She died in Shoreline, Washington, on April 29, 2024, at the age of 90.[10]