Nancy Sargent: A Retrospective
Curated by Adam Erickson and Elysia Michaelsen

Nancy Sargent’s paintings are imbued with exuberance and curiosity. As an artist, she seems to be always moving, always exploring, always evolving. Her retrospective this year at Peninsula School of Art (PenArt) is the culmination of 65 years of creative, perpetual motion. On full display is her masterful grasp of composition and the interaction of color – often balancing a bright palette with intricate patterns and fearless experimentation.

Frequently rendering tight lines and patterns in astonishing detail, she is a careful study of her subjects as well as her craft. At the same time, Nancy embraces a sense of playfulness and is just as ready to shift into loose and expressive gestures. The work on view in Nancy Sargent: A Retrospective demonstrates the unfolding conversation of one artist between abstraction and figuration – weaving back and forth over several decades. In more recent years, the two approaches seem to find harmony within a single composition – florals both rendered and flattened, patterns both referenced and imagined, combined with linear elements to create shifts in perspective among the layers of abstraction and representation.

After rigorous art training in college, Nancy returned to her hometown of Fish Creek to begin her career in art and education. At Gibraltar High School, her alma matter, Nancy was invited to launch the school’s first official art program. She would later open and run an advertising company with her husband, John, in Milwaukee, where the couple raised two children. Upon retirement, Nancy decided once again to make Fish Creek her home. At that time, she was introduced to PenArt, where she continued her artistic development by taking classes in a variety of mediums. The Art School facilitated social connections as well, allowing Nancy to build relationships with a growing network of artists in Door County. She taught a number of classes herself at PenArt, and later joined the board of directors, where she has served as an advocate and ambassador for 30 years.

Nancy is an engaged resident and a dedicated champion of the arts in Door County. She became an artist and art educator despite not having art education in her own early schooling. Through observation and imagination, she creates works that are bold and energetic while also being carefully crafted. She is a fearless and joyful painter whose evolution is never complete, yet one thread that stretches across six and a half decades is a powerful understanding of formalism. She explores and celebrates the creative process as much in her paintings as she does in her life and community.

Images by Kasey and Ben Photography

This summer Peninsula School of Art and Peninsula State Park partnered to offer a residency experience that puts both art making and the environment at its center. Inaugural artists Maysey Craddock and Tomiko Jones were invited to explore the state park through the lens of their individual research; discovering new connections in their practices, creating site-responsive works, and gaining a deeper understanding of this particular place and its environmental circumstances. The residency experience culminates in the exhibition Of Place, curated by Shan Bryan-Hanson, featuring work created by Maysey Craddock and Tomiko Jones prior to and during their residency sessions.

 Curator’s Statement

Of Place is the culmination of the inaugural Peninsula State Park Artist-in-Residence program, co-sponsored by the Peninsula School of Art and Friends of Peninsula State Park. During the residency, Massey Craddock and Tomiko Jones each created several new works of art, exhibited here in context with pieces from their larger bodies of work.

Maysey Craddock’s paintings on stitched paper bags depict images that draw our attention to the nuanced shapes of tree branches, plant forms, and other intimate details unique to a specific place. She pulls us into the work not by painting distant trees in vast landscapes, but rather by bringing the foliage into the foreground, allowing its presence to fill the picture plane. Her mesmerizing use of color and contrast creates immersive painted worlds: microecosystems that reference the Anthropocene, disappearing wetlands, elegy and entropy.

Craddock’s process involves layers of mediation, from disassembling and reassembling the found paper bags on which she paints to using technology to alter photographic images that are then drawn and painted on the sewn together paper bags. In many ways, the organic and evolving nature of this process reflects the changing landscapes she depicts, the way land is altered by human activity and encroachment.

Tomiko Jones uses the cyanotype process as a means of memorial, to bring attention not only to absence but also to presence, not so much to what remains as to what is. So much of Jones’ work explores loss, both individual and cultural. It’s hard to look at her work and not consider the impact of human carelessness and cruelty. Through the cyanotype process which she has referred to as “a collaboration with sun, wind, and water” she tenderly memorializes animals forgotten or left behind.

Immersed in ritual, her art presents an unhurried way of being in a “grand place,” an antidote to the typical checklist of sites to see. She enters the public lands she visits with an openness that allows her art to unfold over time. She begins with questions rather than answers, and the results are intimate and thought-provoking. The deep care with which she approaches her subjects is palpable, focusing attention on that which is ephemeral and temporal.

Craddock and Jones create art that brings awareness to climate change and related humanitarian crises of our time, and yet they don’t prescribe solutions or posit answers. Rather, they guide us gently to see, to open our eyes, and carefully consider what is before us.

Shan Bryan-Hanson, Curator