Nancy Blum: 'Gathered'

About the exhibit:
Quint Gallery is thrilled to present Nancy Blum: Gathered this summer, her first solo exhibition with the gallery. An installation of 9x12 inch works from her ‘Black Drawings’ series will be situated throughout the front and back rooms of the 7722 Girard Avenue gallery interspersed with a selection of other recent ‘Star’ and ‘Flame’ drawings, all on black paper.

Blum’s ongoing series of ‘Black Drawings’ radiate and transform within/beyond each 9x12 in sheet of paper, etched softly by colored pencil and graphite. She begins this daily practice with an image in mind and makes intuitive decisions underpinned by careful sensitivity to plant intelligence and movement, and the spatial geometry of nature. Taken as otherworldly species or mystic equations, these Untitled compositions evade definition. What results, however, is often a labyrinthine, curvilinear meditation on cycles of existence.

By setting them in a black, non-illuminated space, the inherent potential of abstracting concrete form emerges, providing space for its subjects to glow, move outward, or curl inward, always in the process of leaving or becoming something new. “Everyone carries a room about inside them,” wrote Franz Kakfa in Blue Octavo Notebooks, one of his posthumously published journals. Under Blum’s guidance, the endless knot of her forms breathe an air of secrecy and can feel like a door to her own inner world. In drawings which repeat variations on the four elements of nature, they may be approached like a meditation or prayer. This sentiment is influenced by the Tibetan Buddhism tradition of thangka paintings, which illustrate the story of Buddha and have served a multitude of purposes, among them to aid in contemplation or give thanks.

Blum has made hundreds of these drawings and each one is unique. If regarded as small parts of a larger whole, an interconnected ecosystem develops. Attuned to fire, earth, water, and air, drawing as a discipline gives form to Blum’s visioning of consciousness and what lies beyond those four elements, without which we couldn’t exist. Upon this foundation, a set of larger Flame works more directly reference the element of fire and how it has been historically illustrated and mythologized in South and East Asian art. Additionally, several new Star drawings are made from graphite and dark blue colored pencil, burnished and lightly embossed onto black paper.

About the artist:
Beyond the solitude of her drawing practice, Nancy Blum enjoys the often-collaborative process of developing large-scale public works using a variety of media. For New York City’s MTA Arts-in-Transit program she created a suite of large botanically themed mosaics at the historic 28th Street Station (2019). In the spring of 2024, this project was included in the book Contemporary Art Underground: MTA Arts & Design New York. Blum has completed numerous other public commissions throughout the United States, including enameled glass windows at the San Francisco General Hospital, San Francisco, CA; a series of billboards in the sculpture park of the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; a resin flower wall at Sea-Tac International Airport, Seattle, WA; among many others.

Blum received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and has since become a widely sought-after visiting artist, critic, and lecturer at universities nationwide. Her work has also been recognized through fellowships from the Pollock‐Krasner Foundation, Peter S. Reed Foundation, Mid‐Atlantic Arts Foundation, and New York’s Lower East Side Printshop. The first monograph of her work was published in 2017 and features essays, interviews and documentation of her drawing, sculpture, and public artworks. Nancy lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Related links:
Quint Gallery website | Instagram