Nancy Genn is an American artist living and working in
Berkeley, California known for works in a variety of media, including paintings, bronze sculpture, printmaking, and handmade paper rooted in the Japanese
washi paper making tradition.[2] Her work explores
geometric abstraction, non-objective form, and calligraphic mark making, and features light, landscape, water, and architecture motifs. She is influenced by her extensive travels, and Asian craft, aesthetics and spiritual traditions.[3]
Early life and education
Nancy Genn was born in 1929 in San Francisco, California. She recognized early that she would pursue a career as an artist. Her mother, Ruth Wetmore Thompson Whitehouse, was a painter and UC Berkeley alumna who played a leadership role in the
San Francisco Women Artists organization. Genn studied at
San Francisco Art Institute (then California School of Fine Arts) with painter Hassel Smith, and at the Art Department at the
University of California, Berkeley (1948–49) with Professors
Margaret Peterson and John Haley, and fellow students
Sam Francis and
Sonya Rapoport.[2] In 1949 she married Vernon “Tom” Genn, an engineer raised in Japan, with whom she had three children.
Career
Genn's first noted solo exhibition was in 1955 at Gump's Gallery in San Francisco. She received international recognition through her inclusion in French art critic
Michel Tapié’s seminal text Morphologie Autre (1960), which cited her as one of the most important exponents of post-war informal art.[4]
In 1961, Genn began creating bronze sculptures using the
lost-wax casting method. Influenced by noted sculptor and family friend
Claire Falkenstein, who used open-formed structures in her work, Genn cast forms woven from long grape vine cuttings, and produced vessels, fountains, fire screens, a menorah, a lectern, and, notably, the Cowell Fountain (1966) at UC Santa Cruz. In 1963 her sculptural work was exhibited with Berkeley artists
Peter Voulkos and
Harold Paris in the influential exhibition Creative Casting curated by
Paul J. Smith at the
Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York.[citation needed]
Genn was one of the first American artists to express herself through handmade paper, first receiving wide recognition via exhibitions at Susan Caldwell Gallery, New York, beginning in 1977, and in traveling exhibitions with
Robert Rauschenberg and
Sam Francis. In 1978-1979, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and Japan Creative Arts Fellowship, she studied papermaking in Japan, visiting local paper craftspeople, working in Shikenjo studio in Saitama Prefecture,[5] and exhibiting her work in Tokyo. She also learned techniques from
Donald Farnsworth of
Magnolia Editions, Oakland.[5] She is recognized for the layering and dimensionality of her paper works, achieved through her original tearing technique, known as the ”Genn method.”[2]
Beginning in 1989, Genn shifted focus and began her Planes of Light series of abstract, layered, light-filled paintings and works on paper inspired by architecture and sacred spaces. This work uses asymmetrical abstract planes to suggest architectonic spaces and incorporates collaged fragments of maps and undecipherable scripts. Meanwhile, she continued to make use of a wide variety of media including gouache, casein, mono-printing, vitreography, collage, and ceramics.[6]
Retrospectives of Genn's work include Planes of Light (2003) at the Fresno Art Museum, CA[6] and the extensive exhibition Architecture from Within (2018) at
Palazzo Ferro Fini, Venice, Italy,[2] which included an illustrated monograph by curator Francesca Valente. She shows with Marignana Arte Gallery in Venice, Italy.[7]