Nanette Carter Is a Pioneer of Black Abstraction—and She’s Still Experimenting Today

When she was in high school, Nanette Carter walked into the Guggenheim on a field trip to see the 1971 Piet Mondrian retrospective unfurling along the museum’s spiraling gallery. The experience was revelatory. “It was a flash that someone could change so drastically and create a type of art that no one had ever seen before,” she said in an interview in her studio, an apartment in Washington Heights where the artist has worked since 1981.

 

Carter comes from the lineage of Black American abstractionists but has long carved out a distinct path, particularly with her experimental use of materials. Her studio bears witness to this restless practice: rolls of Mylar, the industrial polyester film that has become her signature, lean against the wall; older reliefs in metal and wood are mounted in the studio’s long hallway; half-erased pencil sketches cover the main room, mapping out her complex abstract forms. Scattered among them are reminders of her long, evolving career, from ambitious abstractions done at the Triangle Workshop in 1991 to the small ceramic Cheeks, a sculpture she made as a teenager in the late 1960s and early ’70s at Montclair High School in New Jersey, just outside New York City. Now, at 71, Carter is experimenting with three dimensions in different contexts, introducing new steel sculptures.

 

— Maxwell Rabb, Artsy