NANCY FRIESE

risd connection: Professor, Department of Printmaking

special skill: For the past 20 years, Friese has lived and painted throughout the world, experience that she brings not only to her work but to the studio and classroom.

getting there: Friese has always considered herself equal parts printmaker and painter, alternately creating luminous landscapes and complex linocut and woodcut reliefs. Her consistent concerns – and inspiration – are the shifting tensions between dark and light on ever-changing landscapes, inspired by such diverse regions as Japan, southern France and coastal New England.

along the way: Since earning an MFA from Yale in 1980, Friese has shown in 20 solo and 100 group print and painting exhibitions around the globe. Her work – whether a foot square or six-by-nine feet – is equally grand and gestural, blending a mutual respect for both the European landscape traditions of form and color, and the stylistic freedom of Abstract Expressionism.

making it: Since 1987 Friese has been awarded three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (including a residency in Japan); a residency at Monet’s home in Giverny; and two in Pont-Aven, France. She is represented in over 20 public and museum collections and has been lauded in leading newspapers and arts magazines for the painterly precision and everyday-to-exotic transformational quality of her work.

the road to risd: Before arriving at RISD in 1990 as head of Printmaking, Friese was on the faculty at Bennington College, the University of Tulsa, SUNY-Plattsburgh, Trinity College and Princeton University. As acting dean of Graduate Studies, she strongly endorsed the “second network” advantages only a graduate degree can provide students – “the independent confidence to enter the art world and the academic world.”

when not teaching, she’s likely to be: …spending time with her husband and daughter… rushing off to a College Art Association Board meeting… working on a waterfront landscape series from the end of her street in Pawtuxet Cove, RI…

discoveries: (1) “I have painted and made prints in all the places I have lived – my surroundings are a constant inspiration.”

education
Yale University School of Art, MFA 1980, Painting/Printmaking
University of California/Berkeley, graduate painting classes
Art Academy of Connecticut, Diploma 1977

awards
City of Pont-Aven Residency, Brittany, 1998, 1997
Nominated for Joan Mitchell Grant, 1997
Anderson Ranch Arts Center Faculty, MacDowell Colony, 1997
Blanche E. Colman Award, 1995
Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation, 1992
National Endowment for the Arts Japan/US Friendship Commission, 1992
National Endowment for the Arts Painting Grant, 1991, 1987

gallery representation
Pepper Gallery, Boston, MA
Simon Gallery, Morristown, NJ
Toni Birckhead Art, Cincinnati, OH
David Foria Gallery, Aspen, CO