Janet Goldner creates sculptures which bring together art and poetry by cutting images and text into steel sculptures using a welding torch as a drawing instrument. She combines the tactile, spatial forms of sculpture with elegant, succinct comments on contemporary social issues.

A thirty-year cultural journey began when Goldner first traveled to West Africa in 1973. She has returned to Africa many times, notably as a Fulbright scholar in 1995 to work with artisans and contemporary artists. Images and ideas from Africa and the West continue to appear in her work influenced in part by her ongoing dialogue with Malian artists as well as a response to her own layered American cultural identity.

Negelan, pictured above is a wall installation composed of elements, iconography that have occurred in Goldner's work for many years. She began by arranging elements that had not ended up in their intended sculpture, but which were still evocative for her. The piece developed a structure of vertical and diagonal lines and includes steel figures, feathers, hands, Y-sticks, and geometric patterning largely inspired by Malian bogolan (mud cloth) patterning.