Jeffrey Katz is a principal at C&J Katz Studio in Boston. Started in 1984 with his wife, Cheryl Katz, the studio is engaged in a broad range of design including residential, institutional, hospitality, retail, corporate, exhibition, and furniture.
Jeffrey studied architecture at Carnegie Mellon and Harvard. He has been teaching at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) since 1980. He first taught in the Architecture Department, but after a hiatus to establish the studio, he returned to RISD and is currently a Senior Critic in the Interior Architecture Department—a subject more closely aligned with his professional practice.
Jeffrey began making art in the late 1990’s. He started out by taking painting classes with David Andrus at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. For many summers since, he’s been taking classes at the Fine Arts work Center (FAWC): painting with Jim Peters and Hanneline Rogeberg, watercolor with Linda Bond, and printmaking with Daniel Heyman, Peik Larsen, Jim Stroud, Bert Yarborough and Vicky Tomayko.
While he has worked on copper and zinc plates, most of his prints are monotypes. In the past year, he has had four week-long residencies in the Print Shop at FAWC where he has been working on a series that explores layering and perspective. Using a reductive process, the prints allow a perception of depth that would be difficult to achieve in drawing.
At his art studio in Truro, he has been working on a series of plaid drawings. How design and decoration intersect is a constant topic at both C&J Katz Studio and for his classes at RISD. Paper bags seem standard, perhaps even undesigned, but tear them open into the flat plane that they once were, and each opens differently. There is a certain irony in embellishing them.
Back to his architectural roots, both the prints and the drawings employ grids and drafting, and an exploration of surface and space.