Nanette Carter (2:33)

Yeah.

Alison Stewart (2:33)

Who is someone you looked up to as an artist when you started to understand what art was about?

Nanette Carter (2:39)

Yeah, probably in my 20s. I met an artist by the name of Alvin Loving. He was originally from Detroit. He was in New York City. He was the first African American artist to exhibit at the Whitney, 1969. Fabulous person, just generous, wonderful. And he helped me in so many ways, but I just loved his work also. I loved his work and very inventive. And he was able to kind of open doors for me, which was incredible.

Alison Stewart (3:16)

Thinking back on it, if we can play hometown, what did growing up and how did growing up in Montclair help you become an artist?

Nanette Carter (3:24)

Montclair is filled with artists. We have actors. We have a lot of people who work in New York City who live in Montclair. The Montclair Art Museum certainly was a part of my upbringing. I did take a class there at a very young age. I loved going to the art classes. Let me just say that Montclair had the best public schools. And I know the taxes are. But back when I was coming up in the late 60s, early 70s, I was taking art five days a week along with all of my other classes. I had art projects. We had critiques where the professor actually critiqued our work and we talked about our work. This is something normally you don't do until college or universities. And so we had a press. We were doing etchings, we were doing multicolor silkscreen. We were painting with oils. We had a dark room with an enlarger. We were doing black and white photography. We had a kiln, so we were doing ceramics. We had two wheels. Just incredible. Almost as fine as a small art college. You know, small college that actually has art in it. And so the classes were filled with students who were so serious. We were all very serious. And quite a few of the folks were still out here making art. Myself, Meredith Gaines comes to mind, wonderful sculptor. And so Montclair was very much my time of development, my time of research, my time of trying to figure out again, do I want to go into, you know, architecture? We learned one and two point perspective in the freshman year. I loved that idea of being able to show this sense of depth and space in a room or a house, you know? And then, like I said, I thought about being an interior designer. All of these possibilities came to light while I was there.

Alison Stewart (5:35)

Who was the first person to say.

Unnamed Guest (5:36)

To you, you are an artist?

Nanette Carter (5:39)

Oh, probably my parents. Mom was wonderful. And they would put my art up and they'd frame it. You know, it's nothing like framing it. It's like, oh, it's ready for the walls. You know, it's not Just sticking it on the refrigerator, but actually framing it, putting money out. So my parents and my father actually enjoyed looking at art with me because I think I was able to bring out things that he didn't see many times. And I think he was actually kind of flabbergasted by the fact that I was able to look at something and really pull out lots of different dimensions and areas that he hadn't really seen.

Unnamed Guest (6:17)

Yeah, our parents were probably about the same age. Mine have passed away and yours hasn't. Well, but they worried about you.

Nanette Carter (6:25)

Oh, of course they worried about you.

Unnamed Guest (6:27)

In the 70s, you're going to be an artist. How will you eat?

Nanette Carter (6:30)

Now? That they worried about in terms of how are you going to make a living? But I'll tell you, my mother would tell her friends because they all were like, frances, Matthew, what are you doing? This is a black female child. At the time, I think Elizabeth Catlett was the only artist, female artist of color that we knew about. So my mother would always tell her friends, well, she can teach. And my mother was a teacher, so she said she could teach art. She can find a way. And of course, that's what I did. I ended up teaching right out of graduate school, out of Pratt Institute. I was able to get a job at the Dwight Englewood School in Englewood, New Jersey, private school, where I taught printmaking and drawing. Then I was very lucky. I had actually had five galleries that were representing me across the country.

Alison Stewart (7:23)

That's amazing.

Nanette Carter (7:25)

Yeah, this is now the 80s, late 80s. And so for 17 years, I was able to live off of the sale of my work. Then in 2020, I got a call from Pratt Institute saying, we'd love to have you here full time. I said, I don't want to teach full time, but I would certainly come part time. I want to be in the studio again. This is 17 years of just being in the stud studio. But I loved teaching, and I knew that the children would keep me abreast as to what was going on. And, you know, so I said, yeah, part time, definitely. So back to Jersey. I started teaching in Englewood. I taught there for seven years. Yeah.

Alison Stewart (8:09)

What would you consider the moment when it was really a big break in the art world for you?

Nanette Carter (8:16)

A big break in the art world for me was getting, I guess, my first gallery, 1981. And this was a gallery in Detroit. I was invited, really, because of the artist Al Loving. Again, he was from Detroit. And there was a gentleman by the name of George Anamdi who opened up a huge space there. Downtown Detroit in the Whitney building, which is a very well known building. And it was, you know, very exciting. I was showing with people like Jack Whitten, who's at the Museum of Modern Art right now, Ed Clark, who's with Hauser and Worth, Howardina Pindell, who's at Garth Greenan. So to be with these elders, I considered these were, you know, my elders. Really. Most of them were 20 years older than I was. Was quite exciting, quite exciting. And I learned so much being around them. I think I got the years wrong. So I'm sorry. I was 7 years at Dwight Ingrid School, 17 years not teaching, and then 20 years at Pratt Institute. I just want to clear off that. So yeah, when I went back to Pratt to teach, it was good. It was good to be on that college level too. You know, Pratt Institute. The students are serious and it was wonderful working with them. Smart, very smart. Yeah.

Alison Stewart (9:41)

My guest is Nanette Carter.

Unnamed Guest (9:43)

Her show is titled Nanette Carter, A question of Balance. It's at the Montclair Art Museum.

Alison Stewart (9:47)

The exhibition spans her decades long career.

Unnamed Guest (9:50)

It's on view through July 6th. How did studying at Pratt Oberlin in.

Alison Stewart (9:57)

Italy, how did it help you to.

Unnamed Guest (10:00)

Arrive at abstract art?

Nanette Carter (10:06)

I think hanging around with Al Loving and some of these folks, although I was doing some abstraction before them, I just saw the inventive quality. I just, I love this idea of making a new world. In fact, you had talked about the Afro sentinels, which are sentinels that are to protect black and brown people. Now these are sentinels like no other. You know, in Europe you had gargoyles to protect, you know, the buildings. And in the Congo you had nkisis. But I have these, what I call Afro futuristic kind of forms that I've created. They're very tall. The ones that are in the museum show in Montclair are 8ft tall. Some are very delicate. But they have the ability to protect all black and brown people, not just in this country, but all over the world. So this is my sort of supernatural, which I think Nkisis were about also. These were supernatural beings, gargoyles also. And so to be able to, you know, draw up these massive. They're huge. They're tall pieces, they're stately pieces. And when you look at them closely, you'll see that some of them could really bludgeon someone. Some of them even look as though they might have sort of hatchets on the end. But at first glance, I don't think you see all that. They're just. They're tall and proud and some of them take on the feeling of the body, some don't at all. And so I'm having fun. I'm just again, creating new worlds.

Unnamed Guest (11:54)

When you're in your studio and you're working, what is it like? What are your rituals?

Alison Stewart (11:59)

What's the temperature?

Unnamed Guest (12:00)

What's the light like?

Nanette Carter (12:02)

I used to be nocturnal, and it was probably because I was going to school and then making art at night. And I got so used to that now, you know, with age, I'm a morning person. My coffee, my New York Times, and I still get the hard copy. And then I go in the studio. So I'm in the studio probably around 9 or 10 in the morning. I break for lunch for about a half hour and then get back in. And I'll work until 5. And depending on what's up, because I've had deadlines and things that might be. I might, after dinner, go back in the studio. My studio is in my apartment. I'm in an old uptown apartment on the west side overlooking the Hudson River. So I get a lot of natural light. And the living room is my studio. And so my large wall is 9ft height by 13ft width. And then I have. The second bedroom is an extension of my studio. So I have the two rooms. And I love being able to crawl out of bed at any time and go and take a peek. I love to live with the work before it goes out. Even though I think it's finished, I still want to live with it just to make sure that I'm pleased with what I have. And, yeah, it's been that way for some 40 years. I've been in this spot for 44 years, to be exact.

Unnamed Guest (13:30)

When you're creating a collage, like you said, I have to go and check on it. Understand that. I feel good about it. What's going through your mind when you're creating a collage? When you're looking at all these pieces but you know, they go together or maybe that doesn't and something else goes here. What's going through your mind?

Nanette Carter (13:49)

I'll tell you. I work normally with three to four pieces at a time. And so while I might be working on one piece, the other piece across the way that's not quite finished might actually inform what I should do with this piece I'm working with. You know, if you're working full time in your studio and you come to a point in the piece where you really need to get away from it, you don't want to stop working, so you have other pieces to Work on simultaneously. You know, it's taken me time. I can say that early on, I think I put too much in a work I now kind of. Well, you're always listening to yourself. There's an inner kind of dialogue that's going on all the time between your brain and your heart and I guess, and your hands also. And so all of that is going on. But as I've gotten older, it's all kind of gelling a little bit easier now. That's not to say there aren't times I do have troubles trying to end a piece, to finish a piece. But I think I have a better sense of how to move things around. And the beauty of it is that I can move things around.

Alison Stewart (15:06)

When did you learn to experiment?

Nanette Carter (15:11)

Early on. And that was graduate school, because that was when I was experimenting with abstraction. And one night, I'll never forget, I was in Brooklyn at Pratt, and it had rained. It was a winter night. It had rained. And I remember the lights, the street lights were behind these trees that had no, you know, leaves on them. There was just the limbs. And so I saw the silhouette of these trees, these limbs, and it was just beautiful. And the angles that they took on and what have you. And so I did a piece that basically was mimicking that. And it was sort of from that and being, you know, this person who wants to also try other things. Of course, I'm looking at other artists. You know, I think at that time, I'm probably looking at de Kooning. I'm looking at, you know, some of the Abex people. And so all of that kind of gelled and came together. And this was actually doing etchings because I majored in printmaking at Pratt. These were etchings.

Alison Stewart (16:20)

Oh, that's interesting.

Nanette Carter (16:23)

What happened, though, is, you know, back then, you had to do an edition of 15. You had to do an edition of the same print 15 times. By my second year at Pratt, I got tired of that. I wanted to change it up each time. I didn't want to see the same. But no, a part of the lesson was that you. And they would come with magnifying glasses to make sure that each print looked exactly the same as the other in that edition. A little too tight. So what did I do for my thesis show? I began to collage. I began to tear them up and basically just sort of deconstruct and then reconstruct something new. And I loved it. You know, I loved the edge, working with paper. The decal edge, as opposed to a clean cut edge. The Edge gave it this sense of a relief that it was something that was literally physically placed over top of something else. I love the physicality of it also, but that's where it started. Yeah.

Alison Stewart (17:35)

You work with Mylar.

Nanette Carter (17:36)

Mm.

Alison Stewart (17:37)

First of all, can you explain what kind of material it is to work with and explain to us what you get creatively out of working with Mylar?

Nanette Carter (17:47)

Mylar is tough stuff. Unlike paper, it doesn't tear, and unlike canvas, it's taut, it doesn't sort of ripple, and you don't have to stretch it onto a stretcher bar and what have you. So it makes it very easy for me to paint on the surface and then put this tough stuff up on the wall using double sided tape. And I'm using oils when I paint on it. And I'm also using the frosted side of the Mylar. Architects began to use Mylar in the late 50s because it is transparent. Prior to that, they were using tracing paper. And of course, if you took that really delicate tracing paper to a site outdoors and the wind came, things could rip up. So they fell in love with Mylar early on. And I saw a show in 1984 at the Cooper Hewitt Museum of Frank Lloyd Wright, who I loved Frank Lloyd Wright's drawings and his students from Taliesin. And they were all working on Mylar. And I could tell that the quality of line of the pencil and colored pencils of these homes that they had designed, there was a soft quality. There was something. So when I looked at the title and all of the work and the homes that they were drawing, I noticed it said Mylar. The Mylar was the surface. It was the first time I had ever heard of it. Now, this is again 1984, and I saw this office door that said Curator. So I knocked on the curator's door, which I know you shouldn't do. You normally make an appointment with the curator. But luckily I found this young lady. She came up, she opened the door, she said, listen, you can buy this surface at any art store. You can get it in sheets. So I immediately went out and I bought a sheet. And again around 1984, I did a bunch of small drawings. I cut up the sheet, I did a bunch of small drawings. And I said, okay, I'm going to come back to this at some point. And it was in the mid-90s that I came back and really just abandoned canvas and paper. And now I just solely work on the Mylar. It's plastic, it's going nowhere. And there is a wonderful architecture museum at Columbia University called the Avery Museum and they have some of the earlier drawings on Mylar. So I consulted with them years ago and they told me, you know, the best thing to do is to keep it flat. They said the drawings that they had, that also had rapidography, in other words, sort of ink, like drawings on the surface. She said, we're all fine. And if it's archival, when they say it's archival, that means it doesn't yellow with time. It means that it doesn't become brittle with time. Now, there's certain papers, if they're not cotton rag papers, they will become brittle with time. They'll just fall apart. This does not. It's plastic.

Unnamed Guest (20:58)

There is video of you putting up your art on the wall.

Nanette Carter (21:02)

That's right.

Unnamed Guest (21:02)

Of A Question of Balance.

Nanette Carter (21:04)

Yes.

Unnamed Guest (21:05)

First of all, what do you like about working with such large scale work?

Nanette Carter (21:12)

You know, I love the fact that the wall becomes your format. In other words, it becomes your canvas or your piece of paper. And to have a piece of paper that size, 30 some feet, you know, by 20ft high, I just love it. It's exciting. And I have to tell you, I've been very lucky. Pratt Institute, during its off times in the summer, will allow me to come and use their gallery walls for my large pieces. Oh, that's cool. In fact, you're telling me they are so good to me there. So when the students aren't there, I go to Dekalp Hall Gallery, which is an amazing space. And I will actually then put everything together and really organize the pieces there. I make them in my studio, but I will take them there and really begin to move them about and see how they should be positioned.

Unnamed Guest (22:08)

The show is called A Question of Balance. It is by Nanette Carter. You can see it at the Montclair Art Museum. It goes through July 6th. Thank you so much for joining us here at WNYC.

Nanette Carter (22:20)

Thank you for having me.