'Abstract art is universal': Nanette Carter on her new career survey at the Wexner Center for the Arts

Nanette Carter may have been making abstract art since the 1970s, but her work has never felt more urgent. Carter's elegant, off-kilter forms articulate the alienating experience of life in the thick of political turmoil, drawing on references as disparate as jazz and Russian Constructivism to convey the uniquely see-sawing circumstances of today.

 

Her upcoming solo exhibition Nanette Carter: Afro Sentinels, set to open at the Ohio State University's Wexner Center for the Arts on 22 August, constitutes a homecoming for Carter, who was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1956. Her father, Matthew G. Carter, was a renowned civil rights leader who later became the first African American mayor of Montclair, New Jersey—she was first exposed to art through a childhood painting class at the Montclair Art Museum. This early encounter inspired her studies in studio art at Oberlin College in Ohio and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she went on to serve as a professor of art and coordinator of drawing for its undergraduate programme for 20 years. This homegrown legacy of big ideas and justice-oriented community has grounded Carter's practice throughout her career, imbuing her collages, paintings and sculptures with the warmth and immediacy of Black subjectivity.

 

 — Torey Akers, The Art Newspaper