JANICE LA MOTTA
ARTIST BIO
Janice La Motta’s career in the visual arts spans over forty years as a studio artist and as a fine arts professional. A graduate of the Hartford Art School, West Hartford, CT, Ms. La Motta served as curator at The New Britain Museum of American Art for 5 1⁄2 years before opening her own contemporary fine arts gallery, Paesaggio Gallery, (later known as La Motta Fine Art), which she ran successfully for 18 years. She served as artistic director for the community-development, non-profit organizations Charter Oak Cultural Center, Hartford, CT and Billings Forge Community Works, Hartford, CT where among her accomplishments she inaugurated a federally-funded pilot urban artist residency program. She has served on numerous grant review panels for the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, Greater Hartford Arts Council and the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation. She has curated hundreds of exhibitions throughout her career including serving as co-curator of the first Connecticut state biennial held at the Mattatuck Museum. She has served as an independent arts consultant on various private, public and educational projects. In 2015 she relocated to the mid-Hudson Valley to assume the position of executive director of the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum (WAAM).
ARTIST STATEMENT
During her almost five year tenure at WAAM she ​improved the profile of the organization regionally and nationally, grew its membership, generated new revenue streams, expanded exhibitions and programming, increased awareness of the permanent collection, archives and education program, celebrated its centennial and positioned the organization for continued growth and sustainability. She is currently living and working as a visual artist in West Hartford, CT.
My recent non-figurative work, begun in August 2019, relinquishes a previous, memory-based figurative association to image-making and continues my interest in the physical qualities of paint, the dynamic of a compressed, central space, and creating images that I hope are evocative and intimate. I work intuitively. The act of painting informs the development of the image.