Nancy Selvin

Nancy Selvin, Rough White, mixed media, 24" × 22" × 6", 2003. Nancy Selvin (born 1943) is an American sculptor, recognized for ceramic works and tableaux that explore the vessel form and balance an interplay of materials, minimal forms, and expressive processes. She emerged in the late 1960s among a "second generation" of Bay Area ceramic artists who followed the California Clay Movement and continued to challenge ceramic traditions involving expression, form and function, and an art-world that placed the medium outside its established hierarchy. Her work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Denver Art Museum, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art and belongs to the public art collections of LACMA, the Smithsonian Institution, Oakland Museum of California, and Crocker Art Museum, among others. Critic David Roth has written, "Selvin's position in the top rank of ceramic artists has come through a process of rigorous self-examination … what differentiates [her] is that she eschews realism and functionality, indicating a level of intellectual engagement not always found among ceramicists." Writer and curator Jo Lauria described Selvin's tableaux as "elegiac and stylistically unified" works that serve as "forceful essays on the relationship between realism and abstraction, object and subject, decoration and use."

Life and career Selvin was born and raised in Los Angeles. She studied painting and drawing at University of California, Riverside, and turned to ceramics after taking lessons in Iowa in 1966, where she and her husband lived during his graduate studies. After a move back west, she enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley during a time of artistic ferment influenced by the California Clay Movement and similar movements in glass and fiber arts, which reconceived their work as art rather than "craft." After earning BFA (1969) and MA degrees (Ceramics, 1970), Selvin had early exhibitions at the Quay (San Francisco) and Anhalt (Los Angeles) Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery (Scripps College), and Society for Contemporary Craft. Selvin taught ceramics at several institutions, including State University of New York-Albany (1970–2), and later, California College of the Arts (CCA), beginning in 2007. Selvin is married to statistician and retired UC Berkeley professor of biostatistics Steve Selvin; their daughter, Dr. Elizabeth Selvin, is a professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University.

Work and reception Selvin's art has included intimate, domestic-related ceramic pieces and still lifes, more expansive mixed-media tableaux, and large-scale outdoor installations. purposeful investigation of the vessel form, often in relief-sculpture-like and spartan arrangements; a loose, tactile, unconventional approach to surface and materials, including what American Ceramics described as "an almost primal emphasis on process over product"; Described in The New York Times as "whimsical multicolor confections," the teapots convey anthropomorphic qualities as well as freighted cultural, social and feminine associations in their decoration. At this time, Selvin also produced handmade paper works that embedded ribbons and lace and clay wall pieces that reproduced arrangements of paper, tape and cardboard. Los Angeles Times critic Suzanne Muchnic noted Selvin's "poetic sensibility and use of seductive color," which she wrote enabled the work to tow a line "between the honest earthiness of exposed clay and the precious refinement of lacquer over wood." The constructions often took the form of rows and arrays of hand-built, pared-down bottle, oil-can, bowl and book forms emphasizing silhouette over three-dimensionality; their irregular, leaning "postures" evoked anthropomorphic qualities—particularly in groupings where differences registered—rendering them both familiar and foreign. Selvin arranged them on ledges, double-sashed wood windows and custom tables made from building-supply materials that she treated as equal design components.

Selvin painted her forms loosely with underglaze (rather than glazing them overall), in order to explore color apart from form and to meld color and texture. She has also produced large, abstract gouache-on-paper drawings that critics describe as luminous, textured with scratches, smears and blotches, and simultaneously simple and monumental.

Installations and public art Selvin has created several outdoor, site-specific installations. Looking Through Glass (Berkeley, 1991) was a ten-by-sixty-foot, commissioned public work spanning eight, gesturally painted storefront windows with gold leaf borders, each containing a word; collectively, they read "Through the Viewer Art Enters the External World." For Game Board IV (Richmond Art Center, 1995), Selvin arranged ceramic raku balls and feet and gold-leafed log sections on a floor of square slate tiles, engaging the mysteries of systems, games, placement, form and function. In 2003, she was commissioned by Berkeley Civic Arts to create In Berkeley, an outdoor work in which she inscribed sidewalk pavers with notes and facts from the city's 300-year history.

Collections and recognition Selvin's work belongs to the public art collections of many institutions, including the LACMA, Crocker Art Museum, Everson Museum of Art, Kohler Arts Center, Mint Museum, The Prieto Collection at Mills College, Racine Art Museum, and University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art. Masters: Earthenware (2010), The Craft and Art of Clay (1992), and The History of American Ceramics: 1607–Present (1988),

Selvin has been awarded fellowships from the California Arts Council (2003) and National Endowment for the Arts (1988, 1980) and has received an UrbanGlass First Prize (1998), Westwood Ceramic National Purchase Award (1980), and California Craftsman Award (1978), among honors. She is also a member of the International Academy of Ceramics (2015) in Geneva, Switzerland.