Bio

Brooklyn-based artist Nancy Blum is well known for her public art commissions. For New York City’s MTA Arts in Transit program she recently created a suite of large-scale botanically themed mosaics. Located at the historic 28th St. Station, they celebrate flowering plants that can be found in the nearby Madison Square Park Conservancy’s Perennial Collection. For the San Francisco General Hospital, she completed an installation of monumental glass windows that feature her robust botanical imagery. Previous projects include 50 hatch covers designed for the streets of Seattle and a sculptural installation for the city’s airport; a 40‐foot freestanding sculpture in Philadelphia; and artwork and architectural components for three light-rail stations in Minneapolis/St. Paul.

Blum’s drawings and sculptures have been represented in numerous exhibitions at galleries and other venues across the US such as the Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNC Greensboro; the International Print Center, New York; and the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. Her most recent solo show, Wonderland, appeared at the Ricco Maresca Gallery in New York City. Blum’s work is held in two dozen private and public collections, including the World Ceramic Exposition Foundation in Icheon, South Korea; the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Boise Art Museum. Also among these project is a permanent installation at the residence of the American Ambassador to Belgium.

Blum received her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and has since become a widely sought-after visiting artist, critic, and lecturer at universities nationwide. Residencies have taken her to Bowdoin College, Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Alfred University, Ohio State University, Kansas City Art Institute, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Archie Bray Foundation, Hunter College, University of Michigan School of Art, and the Banff Centre for the Arts, among many other institutions. Her work has also been recognized through fellowships from the Pollock‐Krasner Foundation, Peter S. Reed Foundation, Mid‐Atlantic Arts Foundation, and New York’s Lower East Side Printshop.

Nancy Blum’s first monograph was published in 2017 and features essays, interviews and documentation of drawing, sculpture, and public artworks.

Statement

My large‐scale works on paper, rendered in ink, colored pencil, gouache and graphite, portray a fantastic realm in which flowers own the space. I use a variety of 16th and 17th-century botanical images, from Chinese plum blossoms to German botanicals, as starting points for each drawing. Rather than alluding to an actual landscape, I instead combine species of plants in the same drawing that would not customarily exist together in nature. Obsessive handwork creates intricate layers of visual information to be discovered over time and, in this way, the works become a seductive meditation for the viewer.

I use botanical motifs to create images that are universally associated with growth and continuity. My deeper intent is to conjure the ‘flower’ as an active, forceful agent, subverting a culturally conditioned point of view that often deems the ephemeral and the organic as less powerful and of limited value. My ‘wonderland’ presents a view of life that pulses with expansive fecundity; hopefully, it also propels comprehension of the connectedness of all beings within the limitless energy operating throughout this world.

More recent experimentation has lead me towards investigations concerned with consciousness: science, abstraction, and meditation, all subjects that deepen our sense of being. Recently black paper has become the best canvas to work through these ideas. Spatially it takes on a liminal quality that allows drawn objects to create their own spontaneous logic and therefore take on more liberated and unpredictable organic structures. The objects searching for form reflect my own journey toward realizing agency and balance, reflecting a kind of agility that feels necessary, especially within this cultural climate.

When making art for public spaces, I strive to invest these commissions with similar content, while bringing beauty and a high level of craft to a particular environment. As I conceive and develop each piece, I respond to the specifics of the surrounding architecture, ecosystem, and community in an effort to compellingly meet the needs of the site. My studio practice, in turn, is invigorated by opportunities to design work in relationship to an existing framework, and the special demands and responsibilities this process entails.