Nanette Carter

Nanette Carter’s long painting career has been dedicated to exploring the ways abstraction can evoke memory, seasonality, and architecture. Born in Columbus, Ohio, and raised in Montclair, New Jersey, where her father served as the city’s mayor and her mother worked as an educator, Carter studied at Oberlin College before earning her MFA from Pratt University. The artist recalls the importance of her and her sister’s presence at the dinner table, where their parents encouraged them to engage with adults in discussions regarding news and current events.1 Carter’s participation in these conversations deeply informed her later life and work and nurtured a studied attention to the world around her. The artist’s mother, who taught dance, also served as a critical influence on her daughter’s artwork, as Carter was fascinated with her mother’s creation of “living sculpture” through choreography and her use of materials such as tulle, taffeta, and sequins in handmade costumes.2

The artist, who has lived much of her life in New York and New Jersey, was a key member of the community that developed around Cinque Gallery, one of the few New York City galleries dedicated to exhibiting Black artists in the late-20 th century. Founded by Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden, and Ernest Crichlow in 1969, Cinque Gallery was part of a constellation of institutions in New York that offered a parallel—and largely separate—system of exhibition spaces. Together with spaces like Kenkelaba Gallery and Tim Hodges Gallery, Cinque Gallery offered a critical platform for artists who were shut out from exhibiting work in the white-owned institutions of the city. In addition to Carter, the gallery’s roster included abstract artists like Melvin Edwards, Mildred Thompson, and Richard Mayhew, many of whom faced additional challenges in a cultural climate where Black artists were expected to create figurative work. Carter served as the first artist in residence for Cinque Gallery, and she went on to become one of the organizers of the 2021 Art Students League exhibition, Creating Community: Cinque Gallery Artists, which considered the space’s lasting impact on the history of art in New York.

Throughout her nearly fifty-year long career, Carter’s abstract work has returned repeatedly to themes that explore nature and philosophy. Early works such as her Firewater series, executed with an exuberant hand in oil stick and pastel, were a meditation on the elements and sought to capture the energies of two forces in collision with one another.3 These pieces foreshadow experiments in medium and form found in her later paintings and rely on compositions created through an accumulation of dynamically applied marks on unstretched canvases which blur the line between painting and drawing. Per curator Erin Dziedzic, “Drawing’s innovative potential for Carter is found in its license to transcend formalism.”4 In her Scape series, for example, the artist explored emotional and personal associations of the seasons and studied the possibilities of abstraction when applied to classical painting motifs such as land-, sky-, and seascapes. A key development for these explorations in hybrid practices occurred in 1997, when she began to investigate the possibilities of mylar as a support for her paintings, a decision which allowed her to abandon the rectangular format entirely. By painting, cutting, and then collaging mylar sheets in complex forms, Carter created pieces that function simultaneously as installations, drawings, and paintings. In their color and composition, these works synthesize her early interest in the work of artists such as Sol Le Witt, Romare Bearden, and Eva Hesse into two-dimensional objects which recall sculptural and architectural forms.

In the 21 st century, Carter has continued to experiment with the possibilities of using mylar as the primary medium of her work. Works in her Bouquet for Loving series resemble flowers and other biological forms which seem to expand toward the viewer. These paintings commemorate the artist Al Loving, who was a mentor for Carter, and their titles serve as both a play on the meaning of his name and a meditation on peace and good will.5 Her Cantilevered works, meanwhile, are based on a widely used modernist architectural structure in which an element of a building protrudes, unsupported, into space; these pieces focus on the anxieties of social-media and news cycle saturated 21st century life. Destabilizing, her most recent body of work, continues the themes Carter began investigating in the Cantilevered series. Whereas many paintings in her earlier series used a strong horizontal element to maintain a sense of balance, the pieces in Destabilizing suggest the volatility of world in the first years of the 2020s through precarious—at times even menacing—diagonal shapes, which act as a foil to Carter’s use of bright primary colors. In Destabilizing #1, a dramatic black bar cuts across the work, seemingly poised to slide off the composition. The grey and black shapes are suggestive of the destruction of critical civic architecture, such as bridges or dams, and speak to the artist’s interest in the decay of societal trust and of infrastructure in the early 2020s. Long concerned with organic and elemental dominions, Carter’s work now turns toward consideration of the turmoil caused by manmade forces governing daily life in the 21st century, forces which often feel as vast and overpowering as those of nature.

Anastasia Kinigopoulo