Join us on Saturday, March 18th at 12pm for Janice Barrett’s “Sipsey Gypsy” Art Exhibit talk! Janice is not only an artist, but she’s also a Sipsey Wilderness Guide with Wild Alabama!
Janice Barrett is a life-long artist and lover of forests. Growing up in rural Lawrence County, Alabama in the 1950s and 60s, going to the “mountains” is what Janice’s family did for outings. These “mountains” were the foothills of the southern Appalachians— the Warrior Mountains of Bankhead National Forest—and what was to become the Sipsey Wilderness. By providing her sisters and themselves with cheap entertainment by following creekbeds, they probably never suspected that the sweet, pure air they were breathing was setting a love for the forest into their eldest daughter’s blood; nourishing a strong tendency toward nature-inspired art.
Janice is a plein air and still-life artist working primarily in oils who lives and works in Lawrence County. She majored in painting at the Memphis Academy of Art in the early 1970s. A weeklong plein air workshop with artist Alana Hagler at the Alabama Folk School in 2017 was an enormous influence on her painting career.
It was becoming a single mother, raising her son, and the fierce, innate drive to keep him safe in this world that propelled her into environmental activism. In 2001, volunteerism grew into her current position on staff at Wild Alabama where, as Outreach and Education Coordinator, she organizes and leads volunteer projects in the Sipsey Wilderness and Bankhead National Forest, leads activists to protect forests and water on our public lands, guides hikes and field trips and forest bathing walks. Janice weaves trees, forests, and water into her drawings and paintings and incorporates art into her non-profit work as a vessel for education, constantly deepening her relationship with forests and all of nature. Through art and guiding nature hikes, Janice works to sprout a new generation of forest lovers and protectors, taking children to our “mountains” to walk the creeks and breathe that sweet forest air.
