Jane Manus

By Nancy Stetson

When Jane Manus can't sleep, she puts together shapes in various combinations in her head: straight lines, squares, rectangles. Never circles. Never anything with curves. The West Palm Beach sculptor is attracted to geometric shapes and angles and strong lines that may jut out straight or bend sharply. And her work reflects that.

“I don’t do circles,” she says. “I don’t have anything against them. It’s just not me.”

When she first began creating her abstract sculpture, she originally worked in steel.

“Over the years, I found my own signature,” she says. “When people look at the work, or have seen a number of my sculptures, they can tell a piece of mine from someone else’s.

“I was working with these different pieces of metal and I was able to do what I wanted to do with them, to express what how I wanted the works to look with these materials. The more I worked with them, there seemed to be more shapes I could create.”

Even after almost 45 years of being a professional artist, she hasn’t run out of different ways to juxtapose these elements.

“I think the material surprises me at times with a shape or a way to put it that I hadn’t thought of before,” she says. “I try to make the pieces work when you (walk) all the way around them, and I like how negative and positive spaces are created with them. Also how they work in their environment. I think most sculptors try to do that. I’m agile.

“That’s one of the things I really strive to do, is make it three-dimensional and give you a feeling that you can walk through it, be a part of it. They’re not just different from front to back; it’s different from all angles.”

One collector of her work agrees.

“I have been collecting art for more than 40 years,” said Rand Hoch, a workers compensation mediation lawyer and retired judge. “The two Jane Manus works in my collection — ‘On a Clear Day’ and ‘Into the Woods’ viewed head on, are stable, geometric works. Yet as I move throughout my home, each piece becomes dynamic, changing in appearance with each step I take.

Some are site specific, some aren’t.

They have names that sound like titles of jazz tunes: “Think Big,” “Hangover,” “Girls Night Out,” “Last Letter,” “Skyward,” “Maybe.”

Whether at school or summer camp, “I was always the kid in the art room,” Ms. Manus says. “I’ve always been working with clay, making little drawings with crayons. All through my life, always doing something to with art.”

A native Floridian, she studied for her first two years at Rollins College in Winter Park, then obtained her BFA at the Art Institute in Boston. It was there that she studied with the painter and sculptor Mark Phillips. He was the first artist to get a public art commission in the Boston area, she says.

She remembers working on a project in wood, doing a large construction, bolting and nailing and sawing. But when she applied creosote to it, to protect it from the weather, the fumes were so toxic the entire building had to be cleared out, she recalls.

Mr. Phillips taught her how to weld steel, and she’s never looked back.

“From then on, I was working with steel, and I never wanted to work with any other materials,” she says.

But when she returned to Florida to live, husband and child in tow, “I realized people in Florida don’t like to see steel rust. They don’t like rust,” she says.

So she switched to working with aluminum.

She shares a studio in West Palm Beach with her artist husband, Rene von Richthofen. It’s just a “five- or 10-minute car ride away (from our home),” she says.

“I’m basically a Constructivist,” she says, naming Russian artist Kazimir Malevich and those from the Chicago school of Constructivists, such as Mark di Suvero, John Henry and Joel Perlman, as influences.

I’m about 10 years younger than they are,” she says. “I’ve always admired them.

“There weren’t a lot of women working and doing large-scale sculpture in metal. It’s something I’ve been very lucky to do my whole career.”

Some career highlights include being a featured artist with an indoor and outdoor show at the Georgia Museum of Art in coordination with the opening of its new museum and the 1996 Olympic games. The same year, she also showed in the Art in Public Places exhibition in Florence, Italy.

The following year, she exhibited at the VI Biennial de Sculpture de Monte- Carlo in Monte Carlo, Monaco. (It was coincidentally the same year she exhibited at the then-named Philharmonic Center for the Arts in Naples.)

In April 2019, she showed at the XIII Biennial in Havana.

She has pieces owned by the Boca Raton Museum of Art, The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.), the Cornell Fine Arts Museum (Winter Park) and the Harn Museum of Art (Gainesville), among others.

But much of her work is in private collections.

“I’ve been lucky enough to find that people who like my work tend to buy more than one piece,” she says. “What’s really nice about this business is that I meet people all the time and meet nice, interesting people through the arts.”

Why large-scale pieces in metal?

“I just loved the feeling, the permanence of it, the strength,” Ms. Manus says. “I like the feel of it. I like it even though it’s a material that looks as if there’s not a lot you can do with it, but there are so many shapes to be found.”

Though, she admits, even though she hasn’t run out of ideas, “every time I finish a piece, I wonder if I will have an idea for another one.”

She finds working with the material and shapes “very exciting. And it’s strong. It feels strong when I do it.”

Ms. Manus has a fabricator who builds her large-scale pieces according to her specifications, Rob Blalock of Blalock Fabrications.

“I don’t do my own welding,” she says. “I’ve been working with Rob for 20 years. Welding aluminum is an art in itself. And then, finding a good painter to paint my work. Jose Marti of SIC Colors is incredible.”

Instead of textured, rusting steel, she now works in smooth, painted aluminum, in black and white as well as the primary colors of red, yellow and blue. Sometimes she’ll put a clear coat over the aluminum.

She once had her art dealer ask if she’d paint something in Hermes orange, because a client liked the piece but wanted it in that color.

Ms. Manus agreed. The gallery sent a leather swatch and she matched it.

“Now I use that color,” she says.

During the past months, during the pandemic, she’s worked on some small pieces.

She also designs jewelry and furniture.

“I do wall pieces too; they’re fun to do. A lot of people don’t think they have room for sculpture, but they like sculpture,” she explains. So she designs wall pieces that look different from various angles.

“They work like a free-standing sculpture,” she says. “They’re not just flat on the wall.”

She began making furniture by request.

“A lot of collectors like to have everything in their house made by an artist,” she says. “Every couple of years I’ll have a project doing a piece of furniture for someone. That’s really fun, it’s a different way to think about it.”

She’s also designed her own dining room table and chairs.

Her works have an architectural aspect to them.

“You have to understand balance,” Ms. Manus says.

“It’s very important to me that the work can stand on its own. My balance is good, the work is going to stay. It doesn’t need to be propped up.

“It’s solid.”