Janis Provisor

Art Brokerage: Janis Provisor American Artist: b. 1946. Janis Provisor was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1946 and was raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. She studied at the University of Cincinnati, College of Design, Art, and Architecture, and at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she earned a B.F.A. and (in 1971) an M.F.A. In 1978 she was included in a show of six artists at the New Museum called Outside New York. As a result of that exhibition, she was invited to join New York's prestigious Holly Solomon Gallery. After moving from San Francisco to New York in 1981, Provisor spent a great deal of time in museums, searching for ways to inspire her work, and there she discovered the eighteenth-century Chinese painter Bada Shanren. "He was painting elements from nature that seemed almost incidental to what I viewed as the abstract force," she said. "His composition on the page somehow electrified me." Provisor made a trip to China in 1989 with Crown Point Press's woodblock program and worked in Hangzhou and Shanghai. She returned to China in 1993, first to Hangzhou where she briefly taught, and then moved to Hong Kong, where she lived for nine years with her husband, artist Brad Davis, and their son. While in Hong Kong, Provisor and her husband founded a continuing business, Fort Street Studio, that produces and markets knotted silk carpets that they designed.