Biography

Janet Koplos is a New York City-based art critic. She is co-author of Makers: A History of American Studio Craft (2010) and author of Contemporary Japanese Sculpture (1990) and other books. She has written extensively on crafts and on American, Japanese and Dutch contemporary art and has published approximately 2,500 articles, reviews and essays in some two dozen periodicals over the last 30 years, writing on Richard De Vore, Leslie Dill, Oliver Herring, Teun Hocks, Gyöngy Laky, Ed Moses, David Nash, Rona Pondick, Martin Puryear, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ursula von Rydingsvard and Betty Woodman, among others. 

    Janet lectures, critiques and juries frequently, and has taught at Parsons The New School for Design and Pratt Institute in New York, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. She was for 18 years a staff editor at Art in America magazine and is currently a contributing editor. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Minnesota and holds a master’s degree from Illinois State University, where she was named to the College of Fine Arts Hall of Fame in 2010. That year she was also named an Honorary Fellow of the American Crafts Council. She was also a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts critic’s grant early in her career. She is currently at work on two books: a history of the New Art Examiner, a feisty Chicago-based periodical (1973-2002), and a survey of the aesthetics and philosophy of American functional pottery. 

Janet Koplos

Lecturer
jkoplos@risd.edu

• BA, University of Minnesota - Minn
• MA, Illinois State University

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