Nanette Carter: A Question of Balance at the Montclair Art Museum is an extensive survey of 46 works from throughout the artist’s career curated by Mary Birmingham. Carter is known for her boundless abstractions and innovative works on mylar. This long-awaited show reflects Carter’s long history with the museum, the community, and the town itself. As one enters the show, the first piece is a video titled The Weight from the pandemic days, where Carter films herself balancing various pieces of her two-dimensional painting as more pieces get “stacked” onto the main mass. Setting the mood for the show, it not only introduces Nanette Carter in flesh but also important themes she has been working on throughout her career.
Throughout the show, the artist reflects on social injustices, as well as the stability and support she has received from various African-American communities, including her hometown community in Montclair. The balance is not only an indication of delicacy but also stability. Throughout her life, Nanette Carter has found herself in a loving, supportive community, starting with her own family, where her father was a prominent figure, later becoming the first black mayor of Montclair in the 1970s. Carter’s parents have always been supportive of her artistic career and exposed her to all aspects of culture, frequently bringing her to New York City for performances, events, and exhibitions. Originally from Ohio, Carter also found a loving and supportive community in her hometown, where she ended up returning for her undergraduate studies. The entire show is situated in two rooms in the museum, subdivided by partition walls. The smaller entry part, where the video is, also greets us with Mary Birmingham’s text, who beautifully and subtly narrates the artist’s life, influences, and themes.
As one enters the main room, a larger, iconic piece titled Destabilizing #3 greets the viewer on the left. Right around the corner is Cantilevered #57 (Teetering), which echoes the prior work in its daring balancing act. These works focus on repeated patterns and textures, as well as shapes directly positioned on the museum wall, with a luminescent transparency of the material that Nanette Carter is working with. Frosted mylar, a drafting film with beautiful luminescent transparency, is the surface the artist has mastered since returning to it in the 1990s. With a background in printmaking, she applies her skill to creating textile illusions and textured surfaces. She’s incredibly skillful at creating complex compositions with subtle illusions of three-dimensional space, which also speak to subjects of community, femininity, and global racial issues, partially reflected in her color palette.
Repeated imagery and patterns, Carter recycles shapes and certain combinations of patterns that hint at familiar structures. The compositions are delicately balanced with directional lines leading the eye around. She uses a limited color palette, taking advantage of familiar combinations she has refined over many years. Even looking back at her work from the ’80s to the early 2000s, there is an evolution of shapes, like a refined language. She constantly experiments with the way the shapes exist, departing completely from the traditional definition of a painting. Her ideas of social turmoil and imbalance within society are reflected in a very conceptual way.
Taking the viewer all the way back to Carter’s early years, Mary Birmingham shows how various undertones of the theme of balance have been prominent in Nanette Carter’s work for many decades. It’s a unifying factor from all of her sources of inspiration. Mary Birmingham’s decision to include work as early as high school highlights the consistency of Carter’s thinking but also her development of her unique visual voice and language. Early talent is evident in pieces such as Eggs and Basket and Egg in Bowl, which are both simple still lifes, yet at that early age, they already got an abstract treatment with a focus on texture and experimental composition.
As one walks through the space, one of the most notable pieces in the show is a large multi-element vertical installation titled Afro Sentinenels III. The work towers over the viewers in slim geometric forms, which are meant to symbolize guardian figures for people of color everywhere. The work, as many others in the show, is influenced by political and social issues. She is hyper-aware of the health and socioeconomic threats and safety of black and brown people, not just in the United States. The paintings are spiritual monuments to these issues.
Lastly, as the viewer exits the exhibition, the monumental piece titled Shifting Perspectives is a site-specific installation that is not to be missed. A large-format banner is installed in the foyer with a staircase, it faces a large window that overlooks the street. The work is based on a piece titled Shifting Perspectives #6, originally presented vertically. Within the banner, the artist presented the shapes horizontally, completely, and quite literally shifting the perspective and the perception of the balancing act.
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About the writer: Anna Shukeylo is an artist, writer, educator, and curator working and living in the New York Metropolitan area. She has written for Artcritical, Painters on Painting, and Art Spiel. Her paintings have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Kean University, NJ, Manchester University, IN, and in group shows at Auxier/Kline, Equity Gallery, Stay Home Gallery, among others. @annashukeylo
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