LUCKY FISH IN NEW YORK CITY

Jann Cheifitz graduated with a Fine Arts Degree from the University of Cape Town in 1985. Between 1986 and 1989 she worked at the Community Arts Projecs, she moved to New York and rt production and design to community activists. Jann has exhibited various group and solo exhibitions since 1986. Her work has also been featured in several international group shows and Biennials. From 1989 to 1993 she worked in Cape Town and London with Jane Solomon, producing T-shirts and textiles. There they sold the T-shirts in Kensington High Street and Camden Town market. In the early 1990s she moved to New York and painted sets for low-budget films. In 2000 she founded Lucky Fish, an apparel company based in New York City and with world-wide distribution. Jann found that when her son Gabriel was born, there weren't any fun prints for boys. She started making him T-shirts inspired by popular iconography. When other people noticed her designs and asked for the same T-shirts for their own kids, she decided to make her silk-screening a business. Jann teamed up with fellow South African, Carole Scott, a pre-school teacher, and started silk-screening T-shirts in the garage of the the house they shared for a summer holiday. Today, Lucky Fish T-shirts are hand-printed in Brooklyn. The company name comes from the South Africanism "you lucky fish" said to someone who got or did something enviable, and the logo is borrowed from a sardine can.