Nancy Kamin was born in Buffalo, NY in 1951. The gray, drab, industrial neighborhoods of her childhood served as the backdrop of her early development. As a child she visited the Albright Knocks Art Gallery, the serene space, and exposure to the Yellow Christ by Gauguin was transformative. The spiritual experience of entering a museum, a space of calm, where vibrant colors burst out of paintings, was a refuge, an escape and embrace of life and its possibilities, a refuge she continues to seek and explore. Entering that calm space presented the potential for transforming a drab, depressed experience into one of color and joy. Kamin received her education at Case Western Reserve University and The Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio from 1969-1974. Kamin meets her future husband in Cleveland, and through marriage, is welcomed into Mexico, a new life immersed in family, markets, and landscapes, a backdrop of vibrant colors and textures that influenced her work and reflect a colorful reality. Kamin continues to reside in Mexico, as well as Santa Monica, CA and Miami, FL.
A lifetime of work in review
1970-1985 An Exploration into Figurative Expressionism
In 1974 Nancy Kamin moves to Mexico City, studying in the historical center, at the renowned Academia de San Carlos of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM. During this period Nancy Kamin produced figurative wood and bronze sculptures as well as paintings.
Establishing permanent residence in Mexico, Kamin sets up a studio in Coyoacán to further explore figurative expressionism in painting. Inspired by her surroundings, the markets, and handicrafts, as well as the colors and forms of artists such as Rufino Tamayo, Carl Aarpel, Paul Cezanne, and Paul Gauguin, Kamin’s paintings are characterized by the vivid, emotive, and the expressive power of the forms and colors they contain. During this period, Kamin focuses on bold large figures, flat contour bounding shapes. Color dominates in her paintings, electric brilliant colors expressed through a stable composition where movement is conveyed through the line that gives rise to the shape.
1980-1985 Textured Figurative Expressionism
Nancy Kamin moves to San Andres Cholula, eventually building a home and studio in Tonantzintla, Puebla. The rural landscapes, fields of flowers and iconic views of the Popocatepetl, Ixtaccihuatl and Malinche on the horizon, begin influencing the textures of her expression. Miro and Kandinsky are the artists influencing her work during this period. Abstract elements are incorporated into her work. Vibrant colors, lyrical landscapes, and joyful images are hallmarks. Her paintings express emotions in an imaginative way, taking the viewer into a magical world. Concerned with creating melodious, evocative pictorial images she focuses on adding textures to her gorgeously colored works.
1985-1990 Abstract Expressionism
During this period Nancy Kamin’s work moves further towards the abstract. There is less concern for the figure. The lyrical element of movement is incorporated through other evocative elements like color and texture. The focus on creating complex textures forces an abandoning of the flat form of the abstract composition, in favor of more broken flecked brushwork and encaustic techniques. Kamin’s work is influenced by The Nabis, Bonnard, Vuillard and Vallotton. Her growing command of materials and techniques enrich the texture in her paintings.
During this period Kamin teaches drawing and design in the University of the America’s (UDLA) and painting at the Institute of Visual Arts in the State of Puebla (Insituto de Artes Visuales del Estado De Puebla). She brings her students to admire the landscapes from her studio in Tonantzintla. During the spring and summer, the greens present an infinite variety of textures and tones which together with the colors of wild and cultivated flowers change during the day. In the fall, the white, gray, and blue clouds are in constant movement, expanding our view towards infinity. In the winter, the struggle of plants to survive the climactic conditions are reflected in the tenuous yellows and browns of the earth, contrasting with a deep and intense blue. Her art responds to her environment, reflecting colors, forms, textures, and lines that characterize it, influencing the future generation of artists in Puebla. Kamin’s experimentation in the independent printmaking workshops of the Autonomous University of Puebla (BUAP), leads to a collaboration and the creation of the group ‘Los 5 Pintores’. As the Museo Amparo and UDLA would later state, these artists, “although rooted in Mexican experience ruptured with the conventional and conservative atmosphere in Puebla creating a space for dialogue with international art movements, and the beginning of a truly abstract movement in Puebla.” The group represents this rupture in Puebla exhibiting in the BUAP (Museo Universitario Casa de los Munecos) and the Los Angeles Municipal Bridge Gallery in the USA.
1990s
After a long absence from the United States, Nancy Kamin moves to Silicon Valley in California. In the United States she begins experimenting with ceramic sculpture and glazes. Kamin’s work does not reflect the synthetic, shiny technology of the Bay Area but rather the dramatic landscapes encountered when driving between California and Mexico. The changing landscape from flat to mountainous regions, the changes of scale between earth and sky, the rock formations, and soil variation play with her imagination. Kamin’s work in sculpture is a rupture from the vibrant colors and flat surfaces of her paintings. The surfaces she creates for the organic shapes are textured and earthy.
Kamin’s smaller sculptures gave her the opportunity to conduct experiments with various firing techniques (salt firing, gas firing with reduction and oxidation, raqu, etc.) and to study the chemistry of glazes and develop her own repertoire. She utilized multiple firings and layering of glazes to achieve rich earthy textures. These surfaces enhanced and gave life to her forms. Subtle and nuanced, Kamin’s smaller sculptures are designed to occupy interior spaces, playing splendidly with light, changing as you observe them from different angles, and yet one can easily imagine each piece being scaled up, enlarged to play with the architecture of exterior landscapes. As she gained confidence in her techniques, she developed larger outdoor sculptures that become part of the landscape. Kamin experiments with different clay mixtures to find the ones that could be used in large scale sculptures with forms that expand in different directions. She developed a building process in which the wet clay would not collapse upon itself during building or break during firing. During this period Kamin also worked with other methods and materials (reinforced cement and wood) that would be able to support the structural forms she envisioned.
Having worked with encaustics techniques in Mexico, Kamin’s experience with glazes further influence her exploration of textures in her paintings. She uses heat to burn acrylic based paint into the encaustic, achieving textures which richly become part of her color. During this period Kamin begins painting on non-conventional shapes on a two-dimensional plane. These paintings are designed to be part of the interior space, not merely enclosed works. At the same time, her other larger abstractions reflect an increased interest in painting the atmosphere and space of landscapes. Kamin produces a series entitled “The Seasons.” Through textures, colors, movements, one feels the temperatures and emotions of each season.
2000-2010s Out of the frame
Nancy Kamin returns from a 10-year stay in San Jose California to her home in Santa Maria Tonantzintla, Puebla. She is influenced by the Baroque architecture and exquisitely detailed interiors of the cathedrals and churches of Puebla and begins to use the term Mexican Baroque Art, to describe her work.
Kamin originally arrived in Mexico a young artist searching for her own language. Kamin’s art is a spiritual art, one that is in constant evolution, formally, and stylistically, reflecting her intellectual and artistic formation and the culture and environment of her moment. Besides being influenced by international contemporary trends in art, Kamin is deeply rooted in her everyday life. Making regular visits to Mexico City and frequenting the Anthropology Museum she became enamored by the remains of the ancient cultures and would return to the rural community of Tonantzintla and compare it to the existing Indigenous culture around her. Kamin would wake up with the pyramid of Cholula in the horizon and the volcanoes. Surrounded by colonial Baroque architecture in her village and near-by towns and the city of Puebla, Kamin’s studio is walking distance of two world heritage sites, the temples of Santa Maria Tonantzintla and Acatepec (monuments of Baroque Novo-Hispano architecture). The interior and, at times, exteriors of these temples are elaborately ornamental, exuberant, elaborated with rich textures and color, leaving no empty space, a synthesis of both Indigenous and Spanish cultures. Kamin experimented daily under the inspiration of the colors and the textures of these monuments. Analyzing her work, she sees the abstraction of her work as being the product of everything she has lived and sees daily. The Mexican artistry of these Mexican Baroque temples is rich in color and textures. It is full of movement, energy, and tension. It is charged with elements of an intense emotional search of the spiritual. These are terms that are used to describe expressionist art as well. Because of this, Kamin calls her work produced during this period “Neo-Mexican Baroque,” an art that tries to be as real as her surroundings but without imitating them.
In a lecture given in the philosophy department at the ‘Universidad Autonoma de Tlaxcala’ Kamin speaks about this new tendency in her work. She describes European Baroque art as a reaction to a world in a state of change, advances in the sciences, the reformation, and the exploration of other continents. When the Spanish arrive, Indigenous Mexico already had rich highly developed cultures. While the European art of the time utilized realism, combined with an intense attention to detail, to help the viewer enter a spiritual world, Indigenous Mexican art, used images, not seeking realistic representation, but rather as symbols, and vibrant colors, to reach the same objectives. Observing some examples of different Mexican Indigenous art, we can also see how, like its Baroque Spanish counterpart, it was characterized by extraordinary detail with the addition of exuberant color (we know that the Indigenous architecture and sculptures now worn with time, were once decorated with rich color). The color, the forms and the patterns that continue to be present in Indigenous textiles and other crafts, often transcend what we expect from handcrafts, and for Kamin, fall into the category of art. When the Spaniards colonize and attempt to convert the Indigenous, using their labor to create temples, the esthetic architectural result is a synthesis of both cultures, Mexican-Baroque.
The period of illness and later death of Nancy Kamin’s husband is one of intense emotion and search for spirituality which under the influence of the landscape and Baroque Images surrounding her are transformed through Kamin’s brush into powerful ornate works of art. Working separately with sculpture and painting she begins to integrate dimensionality to the frame. In addition to high texturization, the forms burst out of the frame to live in our dimension while forming another dimension we wish to enter.
2010-2020s Current Work
Its only with time that we can contextualize and place a piece in a period. Thus, we let this more current work speak for itself.
