Nan Collymore

Bio/CV: Nan Collymore is a mother an inter-disciplinary artist and an independent scholar. Her recent projects are Material-an experimental film series, a panelist with The Black Aesthetic curatorial collective atBlack Star’s Greaves Seminar, Contributing Editor of Contemporary and, and she sits on the Advisory Board of the Association of dress Historians.

Artist Statement: Nan uses textiles, metals and collage to consider the body as land, and the land as body. Her work is an attempt at creating a visual language to build a corporeal topography.

She is often working by re-making or re-forming materials into visual projects or palimpsests to re-frame the conversation on the intricacies of Black subjectivity.

Nan explores the forms of the Black body and land through textiles, time-based media, gold and collage. Her use of different media allows for experiments to arise and for the materiality to give way to subtle gestures and residual traces of imagined existence. Evident in her artwork is her engagement with Black studies, critical fashion practice and film and the subsequent intrinsic tension between practice and theory, touch and vision and color and light.

Selected Exhibitions: 2023 The Breaking Room, KATES-FERRI PROJECTS, NYC The Drawing Center, NY SF MoMA, performance, CA

2022 Exhibition, Esqueleto NYC Co-curator of exhibition at Berkeley Arts Center for Soft Material Performance at The Kitchen NYC with The Black Aesthetic

2021 Film screening of Flâneuse at Marisol and Andy take New York at Andy Warhol Museum, PA Soft Material exhibition at NIAD Art Center San Francisco, CA Spring Flowers for Edie Kahula Pereira Film screening of Flâneuse at 2727. Co-producing There Are Black People In The Future book with Alisha B. Wormsley for L’habillement Curator and Moderator of Displacement film series, 2727 Art Center

2020 Through my eyes, curated by Scott Hewicker and Cliff Hengst at NIAD.

2019 Moderator for panel on PostColonial Paradox for Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA Shibumi gallery, Berkeley, CA co-curated Business Casual at NIAD.

2018 Solo show, Fragments, Tanov Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Solo show, Fragile, Dish Gallery, San Francisco, CA Solo show,The beginning of a line. Seven Sisters, Portland, OR.

Awards and honors: 
2023 LMC Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone 2022  2002, UK Arts Council funding 2020 Critical Minded Center for Craft

Social: @nancollymore