14 Facts About Nancy Selvin

Nancy Selvin was born on 1943 and is an American sculptor, recognized for ceramic works and tableaux that explore the vessel form and balance an interplay of materials, minimal forms, and expressive processes.

Nancy Selvin emerged in the late 1960s among a "second generation" of Bay Area ceramic artists who followed the California Clay Movement and continued to challenge ceramic traditions involving expression, form and function, and an art-world that placed the medium outside its established hierarchy.

Nancy Selvin's work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art and Kohler Arts Center, and belongs to the public art collections of LACMA, the Smithsonian Institution, Oakland Museum of California, and Crocker Art Museum, among others.

Nancy Selvin studied painting and drawing at University of California, Riverside, and turned to ceramics after taking lessons in Iowa in 1966, where she and her husband lived during his graduate studies.

In 1985, Nancy Selvin built a warehouse-like, 1,500-square-foot studio in West Berkeley out of corrugated metal and salvaged materials.

Nancy Selvin continued to show throughout the United States, in featured exhibitions at the Richmond Art Center, Charleston Heights Art Center, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, and Baltimore Clayworks, as well as major group shows at LACMA, the de Saisset Museum, Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, and Society for Contemporary Craft.

Nancy Selvin taught ceramics at several institutions, including State University of New York-Albany, and later, California College of the Arts, beginning in 2007.

Nancy Selvin's art has included intimate, domestic-related ceramic pieces and still lifes, more expansive mixed-media tableaux, and large-scale outdoor installations.

Nancy Selvin arranged them on ledges, double-sashed wood windows and custom tables made from building-supply materials that she treated as equal design components.

Nancy Selvin painted her forms loosely with underglaze, in order to explore color apart from form and to meld color and texture.

Nancy Selvin has produced large, abstract gouache-on-paper drawings that critics describe as luminous, textured with scratches, smears and blotches, and simultaneously simple and monumental.

Nancy Selvin's work belongs to the public art collections of many institutions, including the LACMA, Smithsonian Institution, Oakland Museum, American Museum of Ceramic Art, Arkansas Arts Center, Crocker Art Museum, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Everson Museum of Art, Kohler Arts Center, Mint Museum, The Prieto Collection at Mills College, Racine Art Museum, and University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art.

Nancy Selvin has been awarded fellowships from the California Arts Council and National Endowment for the Arts and has received an UrbanGlass First Prize, Westwood Ceramic National Purchase Award, and California Craftsman Award, among honors.

Nancy Selvin is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics in Geneva, Switzerland.