Nancy Selvin

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.Muchnic, Suzanne. "Galleries," ''Los Angeles Times'', December 18, 1981, p. 12.Pasfield, Veronica. "Nancy Selvin," ''American Ceramics'', September 1992, p. 51.White, Cheryl. "Nancy Selvin at Works Gallery," ''Artweek'', June 1996, p. 22.Ostermann, Matthias. ''Masters: Earthenware'', Lark Books, 2010, p. 66–73. 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.Lauria, Jo. "Second Generation: Bay Area Artists," ''Ceramic Art and Perception'', March 2005, p. 10–17.Servis, Nancy M. ''Local Treasures: Bay Area Ceramics'' (Catalogue), Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Art Center, 2012.Brown, Glenn R. "Locus of a Disseminated Style," ''Kansas City Review'', May 2004, p.54–5. Her work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA),Lauria, Jo. et al
''Color and Fire: Defining Moments in Studio Ceramics, 1950-2000''
Rizzoli International and LACMA, 2000. Retrieved July 25, 2018. Denver Art Museum,Denver Art Museum. ''Reality of Illusion'' (Catalogue), Denver, CO: Denver Art Museum and University of Southern California, 1980. Daum Museum of Contemporary Art and Kohler Arts Center,John Michael Kohler Arts Center. ''Clay from Molds: Multiples, Altered Castings, Combinations'' (Catalogue), Sheboygan, WI: John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 1978. and belongs to the public art collections of LACMA,Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Selvin,"
Collections. Retrieved July 25, 2018. the Smithsonian Institution,Smithsonian American Art Museum
''Quilted Teapot #1''
Nancy Selvin, Artworks. Retrieved July 25, 2018. Oakland Museum of California,Lovelace, Joyce. "The Oakland Museum of California," ''American Craft Magazine'', August/September 2003, p. 28–30, 80. and Crocker Art Museum,Crocker Art Museum
"'Cool Clay' Acquisitions Highlight Experimental Nature of Ceramics,"
Press Releases, July 29, 2019. Retrieved July 25, 2018. 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 eris that she eschews realism and functionality, indicating a level of intellectual engagement not always found among ceramicists."Roth, David. "Nancy Selvin," ''American Craft'', October/November 200, p. 100–1. 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." Selvin lives and works in the Berkeley, California area.California College for the Arts
"Nancy Selvin,"
People. Retrieved July 25, 2018.

Life and career

Selvin was born and raised in Los Angeles.Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College. ''2014 Scripps College 70th Ceramic Annual'', Claremont, CA: Scripps College, Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, 2014. 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.Linger, David. "Nancy Selvin: An Interview," ''Ceramic Art and Perception'', March–May 2011, p. 90–94. 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."Barron, Stephanie and Sheri Bernstein, Ilene Susan Fort. ''Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000.'' University of California Press, 2000.Levine, Melinda. "Parallel Views," ''American Craft'', April/May 1982, p. 31–35, cover image. She trained there as a sculptor with Peter Voulkos and Ron Nagle, who encouraged spontaneity and improvisation, producing work that departed from traditional ceramics by privileging color and form over function.MacNaughton, Mary Davis. "Clay Matters" (Catalogue essay), ''2000 Scripps College Ceramics Annual'', Claremont, CA: Scripps College Williamson Gallery, 2000.Selvin, Nancy. "How I Got Here," ''Ceramics Monthly'', November 1989, p. 47–50, cover image.Smithsonian American Art Museum
"Nancy Selvin,"
Artists. Retrieved July 25, 2018. After earning BFA (1969) and MA degrees (Ceramics, 1970), Selvin had early exhibitions at the Quay (San Francisco)''Artweek''. Review, June 17, 1976. and Anhalt (Los Angeles) galleries and California Crafts Museum, and was featured in group shows at the Kohler Arts Center and Denver Art Museum.

In 1985, Selvin built a warehouse-like, 1,500-square-foot studio in West Berkeley out of corrugated metal and salvaged materials. She continued to show throughout the United States, in featured exhibitions at the Richmond Art Center (1995), Charleston Heights Art Center (1999), Daum Museum of Contemporary Art (2004), and Baltimore Clayworks (2008), as well as major group shows at LACMA, the de Saisset Museum,Kouvaris, Lindsey. "Clay in the Bay" (Exhibition essay), Santa Clara, CA: de Saisset Museum, 2013. Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery (Scripps College),Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College. ''2000 Scripps College 56th Ceramic Annual'', Claremont, CA: Scripps College, Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, 2000. and Society for Contemporary Craft.Winn, Alice. "'Earth and Fire' Art Preview," ''Pittsburgh Pulp'', January 1–8, 2004, p 21. 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. In 2018, the "Nancy Selvin Award" for undergraduate ceramics majors was established at CCA to honor Selvin's professional and personal commitment in the field.California College for the Arts. "California College for the Arts Is Pleased to Announce the Establishment of the Nancy Selvin Award," News Releases. February 6, 2019. 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.Peterson, Susan H. "Dynamic Still Lifes of Form and Beauty," ''Airbrush Digest'', September/October 1984, p. 24–32.Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
"Elizabeth Selvin,"
Faculty. Retrieved July 25, 2018.

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. Writers identify the following as characteristic of her work: abstracted, minimal forms that serve as sites to explore painting and composition as much as structure;Baizerman, Suzanne. "Still Life in Clay," ''Oakland Museum Magazine'', Spring 2002, p. 16. purposeful investigation of the vessel form, often in relief-sculpture-like and spartan arrangements;Berkeley Art Center. ''Local Treasures: Bay Area Ceramics'' (Catalogue), Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Art Center, 2012. a loose, tactile, unconventional approach to surface and materials, including what ''American Ceramics'' described as "an almost primal emphasis on process over product"; and a rejection of functionality, enabling intellectual engagement with themes involving the history of utilitarian objects, domestic space, contemplation of the quotidian, and the passage of time. Selvin draws on diverse influences in her work, from early Japanese pottery to the California Clay Movement artists and Abstract Expressionists (particularly their emphasis on spontaneity, materials, and the dissolution of boundaries between surface and form) to less evident sources, such as the austere, slice-of-life photography of Walker Evans.

Early work (1970s and 1980s)

Selvin's early work focused on intimately scaled, nonfunctional houseware forms as a format to explore more complex aesthetic and thematic concepts such as abstraction, form and function, and domestic rituals. These free-standing, hand-built vessels often featured large handles, unconventional finishes, and ''trompe l'oeil'' details. In her "Quilted Teapot" series, she disguised the solidity of clay by slumping and creasing it to create pots in the form of patchwork quilts, which she finished with airbrushed china paint, glaze, decorative decals and images of her surrounding environment.Hammel, Lisa
"Craftsmen Offer a Toast To Those with a Taste For the Unconventional,"
''The New York Times'', June 25, 1977. Retrieved July 17, 2018. 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.Levin, Elaine. "Ceramic Metaphors," ''Artweek'', December 26, 1981.Anable, Anne

''The New York Times'', June 26, 1977. Retrieved July 17, 2018. 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.

In the early 1980s, Selvin's work evolved in a more formal, painterly direction away from freestanding objects and toward arrangements suggesting Western still lifes, expanses of landscape, and Asian craft traditions. Her "Teabowl" series (1981–2) offered spare, rhythmic, arrangements of simple elements engaging form, plane and line: chunky, squared ceramic tea bowls and thin rods of colored glass set on pearlescent, angled, lacquered trays. Surfaces came to the fore, with glaze (unexpectedly on the bowl interiors) and lacquer surfaces that echoed one another (as did the bowl and tray shapes, the latter sometimes functioning like shadows); matte exteriors with airbrushed layers of splatters provided a contrast to the glisten of the glazes, which sometimes oozed over the bowl lips like cake frosting.Levin, Elaine. ''The History of American Ceramics: 1607–Present'', New York: Abrams, 1988. ''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."

Still lifes and constructions (1988– )

In the late 1980s, Selvin began creating larger tableaux of ceramic objects in minimal contexts that referenced architecture and domestic space. While this work was more personal and sometimes suggestive of narrative (with the introduction of enigmatic text, as in ''Rough White'', detail), formal concerns of composition, color and surface, as well as process, continued to dominate.Levin, Elaine. "Ceramic Still-Life: The Common Object," ''Ceramic Art and Perception'', No. 32, 1998, p. 52–58. 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.Clowes, Jody. "Nancy Selvin," ''American Craft'', August/September 1992, p. 72-73. Selvin arranged them on ledges, double-sashed wood windows and custom tables made from building-supply materials that she treated as equal design components.Brin, David M. "Nancy Selvin's Abstracted Forms," ''Ceramic Art and Perception'', No. 33, 1998, p. 19–21.Dickensheets, Scott. "Great Bowls of Fire," ''Las Vegas Weekly'', October 12, 1999.

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. The resulting work features a wide range of material and surface contrasts (exposed raw clay, ghostly layers of matte underglaze, fragmented text, splattered glaze, slate, metal, chalky drywall) and visible processes (expressionistic gouges and brushstrokes, seams, screened images, pencil markings, incised lines) that both individuate and unify the pieces and also draw in the viewer.Pomento, Dawn. "Nancy Selvin at Charleston Heights Art Center Gallery," ''Artweek'', December 1999, p. 27. Curator Suzanne Baizerman wrote that this approach lent Selvin's work, such as ''Still Life: Raku and Steel'' (1997), both a sense of thoughtful contemplation—in their minimal forms and compositions—and unstudied spontaneity, expressed through rustic surfaces and gestural brushstrokes. Initially, Selvin worked with saturated colors that muted the effects of light and shadow; her pieces from the late 1990s onward were increasingly painterly and adopted more limited palettes, often of earthy yellow, white and cream tones.

Reviewers describe Selvin's still lifes as both poetic and meticulously ordered, likening them to '' haiku'' and the bottle paintings of Giorgio Morandi; curator Mary Davis MacNaughton called it "quiet, understated work hatencourages us to look for the visual beauty in everyday objects." Others note a vacillation between completion and dissolution, and evolution and decay, suggesting a timeless quality, like relics unearthed from an archaeological site rather than created. Selvin's conscious stripping of practicality from her objects—plugged bottles, illegible labels, "books" without pages to turn, impractical tables—is a key component of the work, moving it beyond utilitarian and purely formal concerns to engage in metaphorical, often wry explorations of form, function and art, and appearance, illusion and reality.

In addition to her vessel still lifes, Selvin has created ceramic, book-like works combining enigmatic imagery and fragmentary text that recall ancient cuneiform tablets and explore narrative and abstraction.Hanessian, Holly. "Contemporary Codex: Ceramics and the Book," ''Contemporary Codex: Ceramics and the Book'' (Catalogue), Mount Pleasant, MI: Central Michigan University, 2004.Rousseau, Claudia. "Artifice vs. Reality: Ceramic books at Pyramid Atlantic," ''Gazette.net'', July 13, 2005.Morrisroe, Julia. "Once Upon a Time: Narrative, Metaphor and the Artist Book," ''Contemporary Codex: Ceramics and the Book'' (Catalogue), Mount Pleasant, MI: Central Michigan University, 2004. 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. In the later 2010s, Selvin has turned to large, free-standing, hand and slab-built terra cotta jars and urns that sometimes reference women Abstract Expressionists, such as ''Trophy: Helen (Frankenthaler)'' (2016). Artist-writer Julia Couzens described this work as plainspoken and evocative of homespun quality, simple elegance, and the patina of use as a visceral record of time.Couzens, Julia
"Of Fire, Slippage, and Tender Edges: the ceramic art of Tony Marsh, Nancy Selvin, and Linda Sormin,"
Exhibition essay, San Francisco, CA: Patricia Sweetow Gallery, 2019. Retrieved July 25, 2018.

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."Attie, Shimon. "Nancy Selvin," ''Artweek'', March 21, 1991, p. 15.Swift, Harriet. "Catch These Shows," ''Oakland Tribune'', February 26, 1991. 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.Nixon, Bruce. "Nakada, Ortbal, Selvin at the Richmond Art Center," ''The Guide'', March 1995.Taylor, Timothy. "Curator's Statement," ''Nancy Selvin: Gameboard IV'' (Catalogue), Richmond, CA: Richmond Art Center, 1995. 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.Beeler, Monique. "Sidewalk Art," ''Oakland Tribune'', June 24, 2003.

Collections and recognition

Selvin's work belongs to the public art collections of many institutions, including the LACMA, Smithsonian Institution, Oakland Museum, American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA), Arkansas Arts Center,Arkansas Art Center
Collection
Retrieved July 17, 2018. Crocker Art Museum, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art,Daum Museum of Contemporary Art
"Nancy Selvin,"
Collection. Retrieved July 25, 2018. Kohler Arts Center, Mint Museum, The Prieto Collection at Mills College,Mills College Art Museum
"Nancy Selvin,"
Collection. Retrieved July 25, 2018. Racine Art Museum, and University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art. Her work has been featured in several books, including ''American Studio Ceramics: Innovation and Identity, 1940 to 1979'' (2015),Lynn, Martha Drexler
''American Studio Ceramics: Innovation and Identity, 1940 to 1979''
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015, p. 291-292, 313. Retrieved July 25, 2018. ''Masters: Earthenware'' (2010), ''20th Century Ceramics'' (2003),de Waal, Edmund
''20th Century Ceramics''
Thames on Hudson, 2003. Retrieved July 25, 2018. ''The Craft and Art of Clay'' (1992),Peterson, Susan. ''The Craft and Art of Clay'', New York: Prentice Hall, 1992, p. 45. and ''The History of American Ceramics: 1607–Present'' (1988), among others.Wechsler, Susan. ''Low Fire Ceramics: A New Direction In American Clay'', New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1981.Nigrosh, Leon I. ''Low Fire: Other Ways to Work in Clay'', Worcester, MA: Davis Publications, 1980.

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.Baker, Kenneth. "Art Notes," ''San Francisco Chronicle'', June 10, 2003. She is also a member of the International Academy of Ceramics (2015) in Geneva, Switzerland.International Academy of Ceramics
"Nancy Selvin,"
Members. Retrieved July 25, 2018.

References

External links

Nancy Selvin official websiteNancy Selvin profile
Venice Clay Artists

{{DEFAULTSORT:Selvin, Nancy
American ceramists
American women ceramists
American women sculptors
21st-century ceramists
20th-century ceramists
21st-century American sculptors
20th-century American sculptors
Artists from Los Angeles
University of California, Berkeley alumni
California College of the Arts faculty
1943 births
Living people
20th-century American women artists
American women academics
21st-century American women artists