13 Facts About Nathan Oliveira

Nathan Oliveira was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, born in Oakland, California to immigrant Portuguese parents.

Since the late 1950s, Oliveira has been the subject of nearly one hundred solo exhibitions, in addition to having been included in hundreds of group exhibitions in important museums and galleries worldwide.

Nathan Oliveira taught studio art for several decades in California, beginning in the early 1950s, when he taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

In 1999 Nathan Oliveira was awarded the Distinguished Degree of "Commander" in "The Order of the Infante D Henrique," awarded by the President of Portugal and the Portuguese government, for his artistic and cultural achievements.

In 2002, "The Art of Nathan Oliveira" opened, a major traveling retrospective of his work organized by the San Jose Museum of Art and guest curated by Peter Selz.

Nathan Oliveira arrived with his family in San Francisco after World War II and graduated from San Francisco's George Washington High School.

Nathan Oliveira studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where he earned a BFA in 1951 and an MFA in 1952.

Nathan Oliveira served as a member of the Honorary Board of the Humane Society Silicon Valley in Milpitas, California from 2007 until his death in 2010.

Nathan Oliveira felt that his paintings had been strongly influenced by the work of Willem de Kooning, Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon.

Nathan Oliveira established an early reputation for his depictions of isolated figures painted in an improvisational style.

Nathan Oliveira developed a series of "sites" that told the story of an invented culture with shamanic characteristics.

Nathan Oliveira was especially noted for his work in the monotype medium, in which single printed impressions are made from a painting executed on a metal plate.

Nathan Oliveira died at his home in Stanford, California on November 13,2010.