Exhibition: The Mind and Making

Jeanette Vogel: The Bloom Late

Artist Jeanette Vogel was, by any definition, a late bloomer. Other than a few earlier paintings, she began her artistic practice in June 2023—at the age of 97. Working from her home in Boca Raton and under the gentle guidance of Delray Beach artist and educator Neal Hanowitz, Jeanette painted and drew prolifically in acrylic, watercolor, and marker. At the height of her creative period, she welcomed Neal for informal lessons two to three times a week.

In less than two years, until her death in 2025 at age 99 from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, Vogel produced over 400 works on paper.

This exhibition offers a generous survey of her brief but profound artistic journey. Her early pieces, more representational in nature, show a keen sense of form: birthday cakes, bowls of fruit, flower-filled vases, and O’Keeffe-like studies of blossoms. As her illness progressed, so did her style—transforming into expressive abstractions marked by spirals, lines resembling spiderwebs and fingerprints, and curlicues swirling atop vibrant blocks of color.

Jeanette’s work reveals the ongoing dialogue between her creative instinct and the shifting terrain of her memory. Her radiant palette and evolving forms stand as a testament to the therapeutic power of art—and to the human spirit’s unwavering desire to create, no matter the age or circumstance.