Charlotta Janssen: Artist by nature, activist by choice
By Ise White
Photography by Michael Mundy
Creative Direction Nhi Mundy
Beauty Rebecca Alexander
Styling Ise White
I am sitting at a table inside the private quarters of bed and breakfast, The Milliner, located in Hudson, NY, owned by artist Charlotta Janssen and her partner, photographer Shannon Greer. Their carefully crafted space is a world populated by artists, activists, visiting neighbors, old paint trays, and good food. The late morning light is coming through the guest room window, which catches Janssen’s crisp blue eyes as she sits on a stool. The fine lines around her face tell a story of a life well-lived. She smiles with mischief, cranes her neck to look around, like someone who is about to let you in on a secret and doesn’t want to be caught. “Where’s Shannon?” She asks. Satisfied that there are no witnesses, she begins to tell me the story of her life.
Within the first half-hour, it becomes clear to me that she is a magician who is creating in her world so much abundance that it cannot help but overflow into the community around her. Activism and “the pursuit of all things humane” is the DNA of everything she builds. Aside from running their bed and breakfast in upstate New York, Janssen is also the owner of the warm-toned Brooklyn staple, French-faire restaurant, Chez Oscar. She tells me that they recently moved locations sharp on the heels of the pandemic and that she and her teams have been adjusting to “the new normal.” Like all restaurateurs in the city, she struggled with the rapidly changing regulations, steep delivery company fees, and dwindling clientele. She had to pivot, mobilizing her entire kitchen staff to deliver meals to essential workers, including first responders, nurses, and firefighters, in collaboration with actor Jeffrey Wright’s philanthropic project, Brooklyn for Life.
Although talented as an entrepreneur, Janssen maintains that her true calling is as an artist. All of Janssen’s properties feature her paintings. Her work’s most well known subject matter is the “Freedom Riders,” known as the civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated South in the early 60s. Janssen’s paintings feature large scale canvases of eerie portraits with soulful eyes painted using a limited palette in green, blue, black, white, and rust.
Her work has been shown at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, The Memphis Public Library, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana, and the John J. College of Criminal Justice Museum, to name a few.
Meanwhile, the Hudson Milliner’s Art Salon, a gallery located on the ground floor of their bed and breakfast, is bustling with masked patrons. The gallery is hosting a group show called “Jewel the Wound,” which features 28 of Hudson’s local artists. The art show, she tells me, was inspired by artist Myron Polenberg. He believed that “plywood is the canvas of the movement,” referring to plywood as the medium of activists, particularly during the BLM movement. In the aftermath of the riots, following the BLM protests, small businesses in New York City, along with many other cities, that had boarded up their storefronts with plywood, allowed protesters and artists alike to paint messages of hope and humanity through purposeful graffiti.
Much of Janssen’s work is informed by family history, which I soon find out is also steeped in civil unrest. A post-World War II European recovery plan, enacted by the US in 1948, prompted her parents to move from Germany to Maine as part of the Marshall Plan. In 1973, they moved again to Iran, which at the time, was an intellectual and artistic forward-thinking country and where the arts—painting, music, poetry, cinema—were flourishing. But by 1977, protests against the Shah had reached a fever pitch. With the burning of the Rex Cinema in 1978, the writing was on the wall for the last of the Persian monarchs. In 1979 the Shah fled Iran in exile, and Janssen’s parents fled back to their homeland in Germany.
“Each of these portraits is a moment of confrontation: the system telling them that they were wrong, and each of them telling the system, ‘NO, you are.”
Janssen would attend art school at the University in West Berlin in the late 80s. Back then, Berlin was considered a “shelter” behind the wall, a haven for idealists and liberal lefties. Peace demonstrations and anti-war protests riddled the city and were as much a social experiment as it was a decry of the anti-establishment movements. Janssen recalls a time when clouds of cigarette smoke and late-night heated discussions at cafes were the norm; when the young and old sought to make sense of order out of a world battling between global superpowers. “I went to every anti-American demonstration I could find,” she says.
Three years after attending art school, Janssen dropped out, disenchanted by the sexual harassment rampant between faculty and students. “I realized that if I slept with the right people, I’d get the right grade. I realized that it was a hierarchy that served them and didn’t serve our learning. That was heartbreaking,” she says. Witnessing this, her mother pushed Janssen to go to the US.
By 1989, Janssen landed in New York City with a backpack, an oboe (an instrument she still owns), and some “bad modeling pics.” She ended up renting a windowless hall on Grove Street in the West Village for $100 a month, where she had to roll up her sleeping bag by 8 am and roll it back out only after midnight. After two weeks in the city, she admits to being “corrupted and hooked” by its restless energy and optimism. “New York wasn’t what we thought of the United States in Berlin,” she says.
Then came the election of Barack Obama, which profoundly affected Janssen and the psyche of the rest of America. “There was an uplifting feeling that anything was possible, that we had arrived at this great place as a nation,” she says. Soon after, Janssen stumbled across 1956 and 1961 mugshots of the Freedom Riders online, found in a desk drawer in Montgomery, Alabama, in 2006. She knew instantly this was it—the subject for her new body of work. “Each of these portraits is a moment of confrontation: the system telling them that they were wrong, and each of them telling the system, ‘NO, you are,’” she says.
Charlotta would participate in many New York City demonstrations, including the protest to push for the passing of the Affordable Health Care Act. As much as she felt it was important to show up and lend her collective voice to a cause, she didn’t feel like it was enough. “Demonstrations feel basic. I wanted a better vehicle to convey my message,” she says.
“Demonstrations feel basic. I wanted a better vehicle to convey my message.”
With this realization, her voice and desire to speak out against a broken system would take shape in her current work with the Freedom Riders, which she believes carries more importance today. She recognizes the urgency for attention towards our Black communities, their civil rights, and the BLM movement; and it isn’t lost on Janssen that most of her significant shows have been in states that were formerly segregated.
By attending Freedom Rider reunions and cold-calling, Janssen connected with over 35 of the original Freedom Riders. She recounts one particular cold call with Joseph Charles Jones (who is now a great friend). Jones, at the time, was in disbelief of her interest in his past as an activist. Charmed, he quickly opened up and offered her an invitation to meet him and his family in Charlotte, North Carolina. He would become a mentor for Janssen, introducing her to other Freedom Riders.
But even after fifty years, she laments, nothing has changed for these men and women. Their struggles, to raise their voices and bodies together, break down the doors of an unjust system, are yet to be finished. For this reason, Janssen is determined to pick up the torch, and determined to push herself in exploring her work even further. “I am not an activist. I should do so much more to be that,” she says. “I want to use art as a device to process the burden of our past. This movement is made up of noble men and women who deserve to be seen and heard.”
