Nancy Manter

Nancy Manter is an American visual artist based on the East Coast. Her paintings, drawings and photographs of temporal works are inspired by physical processes and properties of the earth and capture qualities such as movement, disruption and ephemerality. Although generally abstract and rooted in formal aspects of picture-making, her translations of the shifting dynamics of weather and environment function as metaphors for human experience in a precarious world, suggesting themes regarding interdependence, memory as a vehicle for critique, and the fate of the planet (e.g., Stay Still #13, 2016). Critic Stephen Maine observed, Manter's work "expresses an attitude toward the world, predicated on a belief in the efficacy of images in conveying meaning. That worldview, it seems to me, is a hybrid of curiosity and caution. Manter is curious about conflict—in fact, she relies on conflict of various kinds to give rise to the drama, the pictorial momentum, in her work." Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), British Museum, The Phillips Collection, and Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has exhibited at the Drawing Center, Kentler International Drawing Space, Baker Museum and Missoula Art Museum, among other venues. She lives and works in Beacon, New York and Bass Harbor, Maine. The local landscape, characterized by extreme contrasts in weather and geological features, has had an equally profound influence on her work. "Dynamic Intervention" (Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, 2013), and the traveling show, "Blurring Boundaries: Women of the American Abstract Artists 1936-Present" (South Bend Museum of Art, 2019; Baker Museum, 2021).

Work and reception Manter's interests extend across art history and natural science subjects such as tides, extreme atmosphere, wind circulation, geological surfaces and plate tectonics. Visual inspirations include scientific charts, maps and Landsat images. Her art-historical influences include Japanese and Chinese landscapes, modernists Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and Charles Burchfield, contemporary artist Elizabeth Murray, and historical figures such as the Hudson River School painters. Her shift to abstraction in the 1990s paradoxically led to more direct, transparent methods with a strong gestural component that balanced deliberate orchestration with chance occurrence and evoked the movement of the body in space. Her photographs of these actions have often served as sedimentary layers onto which she poured or spilled distemper paint or stacked in thin layers of collage over to suggest geological surfaces. She printed them on acetate, overlaid her own skid-like marks, and then displayed the results floating against areas of charcoal-drawn wall (Boston Center for the Arts, 2004), creating uncertain spaces in terms of dark and light, mark versus ground, and origin.

In shows at the Islip Art Museum, Central Park Arsenal Galley and College of the Atlantic (2009–10), Manter took a similarly layered approach to convey the human imprint on place and nature by tracing on frosted or condensation-laden windshields. Her "Run and Slide" and "Run and Pour" series (2021) employ pockets of color that suggest toxic chemical activity, such as the yellow and green smog and waterways of Superfund sites. Chazen Museum of Art, Delaware Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Whitney Museum, She has been awarded artist residencies by Fundación Valparaiso (Spain), MacDowell, the Princeton Atelier, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Ucross Foundation. In 1996, Manter was inducted into American Abstract Artists in New York.