Nancy Genn Explained

Nancy Genn
Birth Place:San Francisco
Nationality:American
Education:University of California, Berkeley

Nancy Genn is an American artist living and working in Berkeley, California known for works in a variety of media, including paintings, bronze sculpture, printmaking, and handmade paper rooted in the Japanese washi paper making tradition.[1] Her work explores geometric abstraction, non-objective form, and calligraphic mark making, and features light, landscape, water, and architecture motifs. She is influenced by her extensive travels, and Asian craft, aesthetics and spiritual traditions.[2]

Early life and education

Nancy Genn was born in 1929 in San Francisco, California. She recognized early that she would pursue a career as an artist. Her mother, Ruth Wetmore Thompson Whitehouse, was a painter and UC Berkeley alumna who played a leadership role in the San Francisco Women Artists organization. Genn studied at San Francisco Art Institute (then California School of Fine Arts) with painter Hassel Smith, and at the Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley (1948–49) with Professors Margaret Peterson and John Haley, and fellow students Sam Francis and Sonya Rapoport. In 1949 she married Vernon “Tom” Genn, an engineer raised in Japan, with whom she had three children.

Career

Genn's first noted solo exhibition was in 1955 at Gump's Gallery in San Francisco. She received international recognition through her inclusion in French art critic Michel Tapié’s seminal text Morphologie Autre (1960), which cited her as one of the most important exponents of post-war informal art.[3]

In 1961, Genn began creating bronze sculptures using the lost-wax casting method. Influenced by noted sculptor and family friend Claire Falkenstein, who used open-formed structures in her work, Genn cast forms woven from long grape vine cuttings, and produced vessels, fountains, fire screens, a menorah, a lectern, and, notably, the Cowell Fountain (1966) at UC Santa Cruz. In 1963 her sculptural work was exhibited with Berkeley artists Peter Voulkos and Harold Paris in the influential exhibition Creative Casting curated by Paul J. Smith at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York.

Genn was one of the first American artists to express herself through handmade paper, first receiving wide recognition via exhibitions at Susan Caldwell Gallery, New York, beginning in 1977, and in traveling exhibitions with Robert Rauschenberg and Sam Francis. In 1978-1979, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and Japan Creative Arts Fellowship, she studied papermaking in Japan, visiting local paper craftspeople, working in Shikenjo studio in Saitama Prefecture,[4] and exhibiting her work in Tokyo. She also learned techniques from Donald Farnsworth of Magnolia Editions, Oakland. She is recognized for the layering and dimensionality of her paper works, achieved through her original tearing technique, known as the ”Genn method.”

Beginning in 1989, Genn shifted focus and began her Planes of Light series of abstract, layered, light-filled paintings and works on paper inspired by architecture and sacred spaces. This work uses asymmetrical abstract planes to suggest architectonic spaces and incorporates collaged fragments of maps and undecipherable scripts. Meanwhile, she continued to make use of a wide variety of media including gouache, casein, mono-printing, vitreography, collage, and ceramics.[5]

Retrospectives of Genn's work include Planes of Light (2003) at the Fresno Art Museum, CA and the extensive exhibition Architecture from Within (2018) at Palazzo Ferro Fini, Venice, Italy, which included an illustrated monograph by curator Francesca Valente. She shows with Marignana Arte Gallery in Venice, Italy.[6]

Selected solo exhibitions

Genn's solo exhibitions include:

Selected group exhibitions

Genn's work has been included in the following group exhibitions:

Awards

Genn has received the following awards:

Collections

Genn is represented in the following collections:

Notes and References

  1. Book: Valente . Francesca . Architecture from Within . 2018 . Skira Editore . Milano, Italy . 978-88-572-3785-5 . First.
  2. Book: Nixon . Bruce . Touched by Light: Recent Paintings by Nancy Genn . 1997 . Thorner Press . New York.
  3. Book: Tapié . Michel . Morphologie Autre . 1960 . Edizioni D'arte Fratelli Pozzo . Italy .
  4. Book: Eagles-Smith . Kim . Nancy Genn: Works on Paper . 1991 . Harcourts Modern and Contemporary Art . San Francisco . 0-941576-17-5.
  5. Book: Pilar . Jacqueline . Planes of Light . 2003 . The Fresno Art Museum . Fresno, California . 0-932325-77-7.
  6. Book: Valente . Francesca . Inner Landscapes - Nancy Genn . 2021 . Grafiche Veneziane for Marignana Arte . Venice, Italy . 979-12-80145-11-6.
  7. Web site: Richard . David . Nancy Genn: A Painting Survey Works from the Late 1950s through 2023 . David Richard Gallery . 29 August 2023.
  8. Web site: Valente . Francesca . Beyond the Grid . Palazzo Collicola . Galleria d'Arte Moderna . 29 August 2023.
  9. Web site: Cadenti . Matilde . Artist / Nancy Genn . Marignana Arte . Marignana Arte (Gallery) . 22 January 2023.
  10. Web site: Nancy Genn Albright-Knox . www.albrightknox.org.
  11. Web site: Nancy Genn MoMA . The Museum of Modern Art . en.
  12. Web site: Genn, Nancy · SFMOMA . SFMOMA.
  13. Web site: Nancy Genn Smithsonian American Art Museum . americanart.si.edu.

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