July 19 - September 18, 2016
from NDMA: A sense of the local is central to Nancy Friese's work, which documents places and events that are specific and personal, while offering them up to be shared by the viewer. Friese is a landscape artist, and, though she lives and works most of the year in Rhode Island, she spends several weeks each summer in rural Buxton, North Dakota, on the land her great-grandfather homesteaded when he emigrated from Norway. It is land she has drawn again and again, depicting its expansive fields and seemingly endless skies, sometimes in vivid paint and sometimes in intimate etched lines.
Summers end and the artist returns to the East Coast to continue developing her images, sometimes as prints, but also oil paintings on canvas, and watercolors as large as nine-feet wide and five-feet high, or as small as 30 x 30 inches. Her prints include woodcuts, etchings, drypoints, and monotypes.
Friese entered the University of North Dakota and left in 1970 as a registered nurse. It was art, however, which claimed her: a BA from the Cincinnati Art Academy, a year at Berkeley in the painting program, and ultimately an MFA from Yale. For years she was head of printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design while working as a full-time artist. She has won numerous grants, awards, and invitations to paint at such coveted sites as Monet's gardens at Giverny and in Japan on a Japan-US Friendship Commission. Friese was elected an Academician in the National Academy Museum and School in New York, NY. She has shown in 170 group shows and had thirty solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally.
Encircling Trees and Radiant Skies was also exhibited at the Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI, and subsequently traveled to the Alexandre Hogue Gallery, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK.
