Jean Follett was born in 1917 in St. Paul, Minnesota. She was a student at the St. Paul Gallery and School of Art in the late 1930s, before moving to New York City in 1946. In New York, Follett studied art with Hans Hofmann and was a founding member of the Hansa gallery collective. She was also shown in the Green Gallery under the direction of Richard Bellamy and Ivan Karp. Her work used thick layers of paint embedded with found objects to create relief sculptures. Among the found objects used in her reliefs are tools, machine parts, light switches, nails, springs, and pieces of pipe. Her assemblage techniques elevated the everyday objects and street trash, using a two-dimensional picture plane to transform three-dimensional objects into abstract forms. Follett was one of the first American artists to use junk metal to create such hybrid objects, and her technique influenced the style of her fellow Hofmann student and romantic partnerRichard Stankiewicz. She also influenced the work of her contemporaries Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, and George Segal. Follett's work was included in the 1954 Guggenheim exhibit Younger American Painters, in the Group 3 show at Rutgers University in 1959, and in Sam Wagstaff's landmark 1964 exhibit "Black, White, and Grey." She had work exhibited in three shows at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1960s, including the international survey The Art of Assemblage. Follett listed her exhibited works at very high prices, shocking her fellow artists at the Hansa Gallery. This may have been a strategy intended to maintain her ownership of her artwork, or to stave off the disappointment associated with her paintings frequently failing to sell. The art collector Horace Richter was one of the few to successfully purchase one of her works. Because her art career was not financially profitable, like many of her peers, Follett supported herself as a freelance draftsman. A studio fire destroyed much of her portfolio in 1962 and that loss, combined with health problems related to alcoholism, contributed to a decline in her art-world status and career. Follett ultimately left New York for Minnesota and never returned. She fell into obscurity and is still a marginalized figure in the history of a scene in which she was briefly influential. Ivan Karp described her as a pioneer of "remarkable historic importance" whose adventurous work was perhaps too challenging to find a market at the time. Jean Follett died on July 6, 1990 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the American College of Greece, the Walker Art Center and the Minnesota Historical Society.
