JEFF SCHLANGER a New York City native, graduate of Music & Art High School and student of Maija Grotell at Cranbrook,  has developed public art projects on three interrelated subjects : Music, War and Peace.

music Witness® paintings and sculpture have been part of all 14 annual Vision Festivals held each spring in New York City. In 2003, a long scroll of thirty-five paintings was created live over seven nights of avantjazz concerts as part of a fifty-foot wall installation in the space. Music Witness® was featured as performance painter at InterPlay!Berlin 2006, in the Tampere, Finland Jazz Happening 2000—2003 & 2006, at Sons d’Hiver in Paris 2004, at AIMToronto in 2007 & 2008 where a permanent installation is on view at Somewhere There and as graphics artist at the Guelph, Canada Jazz Festival 2002 & 2005.

music Witness® exhibitions have also been held at the Academy of the Arts, Berlin, Hunterdon NJ Art Museum, Webster University-St. Louis, and at El Bohio, the Improvisors Collective, the Learning Alliance and the Orensanz Art Center on New York’s Lower East Side. Four exhibitions were integrated into the old Knitting Factory on Houston Street from 1993 to 1995 and three major works installed in the Knitting Factory on Leonard Street in New York. Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco held a solo exhibition along with two live painting-demonstration concerts and a BlueGuitar sculpture was created during a live concert in Sonoma, California Art Center in 1999.

A major painting and sculpture installation was installed in New York at the CUE Art Foundation in 2005 featuring two live concerts in the charged space. The second concert, featuring William Parker, Oluyemi Thomas, Joe McPhee and Lisa Sokolov, is now documented on DVD as SPIRITWORLD, premiered in June 2006 in Berlin at the Academy of the Arts and in New York at Anthology Film Archives.

Over 30 recording covers have been made at the request of many leading musicians including Julius Hemphill, Muhal Richard Abrams & Roscoe Mitchell, Charles Gayle, William Parker, Billy Bang and Kidd Jordan. Color features on musicWitness® were published in Japan by Morning magazine, in Australia by Ceramics: Art & Perception, Germany by BeQ! and France in Papiers Nicklés #2, 2004. The Other Dimension of Sound, with extensive illustrations, appeared in Signal to Noise #49 in 2008.

The musicWitness® Project, launched in 1975, continues an extended series of paintings, drawings and prints created during live performances of improvising musicians. These images can also be seen as connected to form a long scroll, a two-handed seismographic musical transcription extending over three decades. A sculptural army of glazed ceramic stoneware musicians, the Peace Guardians, is under development as well. Grouped together, musicWitness® painting & sculpture can charge public spaces with appropriate visual arts energy to inspire fresh live musical performances. 

CHILE•NEW YORK•IRAQ , (1975-2009), is a black wall of 400 ceramic stoneware Faces, sections of which have been exhibited in over 40 public spaces including the City University Graduate Center in New York. The last Face is called ‘Nagasaki’. Three monumental canopic Jars: Jara CHILE, Polska & Salvador stand before the wall. A sound environment for this sculpture ensemble was composed and recorded by Julius Hemphill.  

50 Faces are currently on public outdoor view at the Clay Art Center in Port Chester, NY, dedicated on October 12, 2008 with a live concert by Roy Campbell, Joe McPhee, Bob Stewart and Zen Matsuura in renewal of its sound environment.

Maija PEACE Shrine, a building of glazed brick, steel, concrete, stone and earth functions as a dedicated center for the peaceful arts. Its framework contains bells and gongs from around the world which ring out daily. Two international mini-Symposiums were held there in 1986 & 1991. A ceramic model of Maija Peace Shrine was built during the 1993 International Symposium in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and continues on permanent exhibition at the International Museum of Peace in Samarkand.