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It was there that she met her husband Charles Janoff, who was a successful music publisher and song promoter. Janoff went on to represent many prominent writers whose songs were well known American standards, in Broadway musicals and on the radio. They were married in 1947. Years later, Katjanelson stated that her prints were “motivated by an impulse to record sound patterns”, and that the grid format provided “inevitable solutions for each sound”. Her interest in visualizing sound alludes to influences she absorbed from both her father and her husband.
The Janoffs had two children. Jaine was born in 1950, Peter six years later. But motherhood does not seem to have slowed Katjanelson’s relentless drive. Jaine remembers her mother using any spare moment to work in her darkroom, while she was at school, or after the children’s bedtime. Peter recalls witnessing his mother directing her first film and how impressed he was by her remarkable command of the new medium. A feminist without assuming the title, one perceives Katjanelson as a woman who tried to do it all.
From 1957 to 1960, Katjanelson co-directed the Workshop Gallery in mid-town New York City with fellow artist Constance Kane. In a recent telephone conversation with this author, Kane remembered Katjanelson as “fearless…she could do anything”. Among the then-emerging artists the two women exhibited were Jules Olitski, Ralph Humphrey, Philip Pearlstein and Jack Tworkov, all future modernist masters. This accomplishment is especially impressive when one realizes that Katjanelson had not yet begun her academic career. She received her BA in film at Hunter College in 1974, when she was fifty-two years of age. Soon thereafter, she exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, the School for Social Research, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Art in Embassies program.