Janet Doub Erickson

• Name — Janet Doub Erickson • Birth Name — Janet Ann Doub • Born — 29 June 1924 • Birthplace — Hagerstown, Maryland, U.S. • Died — 3 September 2021 • Place of death — Wellfleet, Massachusetts, U.S. • Field — Printmaking, Painting • Training — * University of Mary Washington • Massachusetts College of Art and Design

Janet Doub Erickson was founding partner, chief designer, and head of production of the Blockhouse of Boston, where she was credited with producing ninety percent of the organization’s designs. For her work she became the second young Boston artist chosen for recognition by the Institute of Contemporary Art. Blockhouse artisans designed and produced original textiles including draperies, wall hangings, table linens, costume treatments and other art. The co-op specialized in linoleum blockprints — also known as linocuts — and screen printing. Blockhouse was noted for bold modernism as well as original use of New England themes and motifs intermingled with designs at times inspired by indigenous and ethnic arts from around the world. From its founding in 1947 to its dissolution in 1955, the work of Blockhouse was featured in Life, Vogue, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper's Bazaar, The Christian Science Monitor, Women's Wear Daily, The Boston Globe, and numerous other regional publications.

• Illustration — A multicolour linoprint of sunflowers In 1954 she received a Young American Artist award for printed textile design from the American Craft Council. She received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant in 1955 for textile design. Janet Doub Erickson’s art has been represented in more than twenty-five regional and national shows and international traveling exhibits. The United States State Department included Blockhouse textiles in international exhibitions that toured in Europe and Israel during the nineteen-fifties. She also designed textiles for Harvard and Tufts universities in addition to Wellesley and Williams colleges. Janet Doub Erickson was notable for pioneering the practice of jumping on linoleum and wood blocks to make the ink stick deeper into her textiles. For this innovation Gjon Mili profiled and photographed her for the newsweekly Life in 1951, giving her the nickname of “Jumping Janet.” • Illustration — Lares & Penates, 1950 (linocut), Janet Doub Erickson Doub was also the subject of a profile in the art magazine Craft Horizons. Her work was reviewed in American Artist and won a first prize in textile design from the American Craftsmen's Council in 1954.

Erickson’s first book on blockprinting, Blockprinting on Textiles (Reinhold 1966), summarizing her textile-printing and design practices, went into two editions. A 1961 book she co-wrote with Adelaide Sproul, Printmaking Without A Press (Watson-Guptill 1961), popularized both traditional and innovative linoleum (linocut) and wood-cut printing techniques. In 1989 she published her early line drawings in the retrospective book Drawings of Old Boston Houses, an architectonic work focused on her youth in New England.

• Illustration — Fishing boat docked at the sardine factory pier, Postira, Dalmatia, 1979 Janet Ann Doub was born in Hagerstown, Maryland and spent her early years in nearby Boonsboro, Maryland, before moving to Winchester, Massachusetts in the 1930s and graduating from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1947. Doub married Evarts Erickson, with whom she had five children, and adopted the name Janet Doub Erickson. In the 1950s the couple moved to Mexico and lived for several years on a fellowship from The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. She died at her home on Duck Creek in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on September 3, 2021, at the age of 97.