About the artist:

Joan Nelson (born 1958, El Segundo, California) is a visual artist who lives and works in upstate New York. For over three decades, Nelson has been making "epic and theatrical landscape paintings," borrowing from art history and re-presenting iconic vistas from the Fine Art lexicon including those of the Hudson River and Mount Hood. Joan Nelson spent her youth in St. Louis, Missouri, and "emerged from the East Village in the mid-‘80s at the forefront of a landscape revival that blurred the line between romance and irony.” Now, as then, Nelson paints small paintings on thick pieces of wood using a variety of materials such as oil paint and glitter, often combined with wax.She is well known for incorporating multiple pictorial landscape traditions in her vistas, combining fragments of paintings by other artists including those of artists: Hergé (Georges Remi), who illustrated Tintin, Albrecht Altdorfer, Albert Bierstadt, Edward Hicks, Caspar David Friedrich, and George Caleb Bingham. Born 1958 El Segundo, CA. Currently lives and works in upstate New York. Education 1981 Washington University, St. Louis, MO, B.F.A. 1981-82 Awarded the Max Beckman Memorial Scholarship Brooklyn Museum School, New York, NY Selected Solo Exhibitions 2011 Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Fleicher/Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA 2002 Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2001 Robert Miller Gallery, New York, NY 1999 David Floria Gallery, Aspen, CO 1998 Robert Miller Gallery, New York, NY Kohn Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1997 “Paintings Over Prints by Joan Nelson,” Cirrus, Los Angeles, CA 1996 The Nave Museum, Victoria, TX 1995 Robert Miller Gallery, New York, NY 1994 John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA 1993 Robert Miller Gallery, New York, NY 1992 “Joan Nelson: New Paintings and Works on Paper,” Michael Kohn Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 1991 Freedman Gallery, Albright College, Reading, PA 1990 Robert Miller Gallery, New York, NY Michael Kohn Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 1989 Robert Miller Gallery, New York, NY “Currents 39,” St. Louis Arts Museum, St. Louis, MO 1988 Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX 1987 Fawbush Gallery, New York, NY Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1986 P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York, NY Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1985 P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York, NY Selected Group Exhibitions 2010 “25th Anniversary Show,” Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Power to the People,” Feature Inc., New York, NY “Small Spaces,” J. Johnson Gallery, Jacksonville Beach, FL 2009 “The Tree,” James Cohen Gallery, Shanghai, China “Landscape Today,” University of Delaware, Newark, DE. “Natural Order,” The Painting Center, New York, NY. 2007 “Flip Viola an the Blurs (Misrepresenting an artwork can result in a non-art expience of comparable value.)” Triple Candie, New York, NY. 2006 Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL. 2002- Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL. 2003 The Contemporary Landscape,” Ebert Art Center, The College of Wooster, OH. “Northern Light,” Danese Gallery, New York, NY 2001 “Secret Victorians: Contemporary Artists and a 19th-Century Vision,” The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA 2000 “Maxfield Parrish: 1970-1966,” Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA “Waxing Poetic: Encaustic Art in America,” The Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ “Of Darkness and Light,” Art Museum of Western Virginia, Roanoke, VA “Shifting Ground: Transformed Views of the American,” Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA “”Nature: Contemporary Art and the Natural World,” Contemporary Gallery, Marywood University, Scranton, PA “Conceptual Realism,” The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA 1999 “Cityscape/Landscape,” Karen McCready Fine Art, New York, NY “Encyclopedia 1999,” Turner & Runyon, Dallas, TX “Equilibrium of the Senses,” Nohra Haime Gallery, New York, NY “As Far As the Eye Can See,” Atlanta College of Art Gallery, Atlanta, GA “Wildflowers,” Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY “Why Draw a Landscape?” Karen McCready Fine Art, New York, NY 1998 “Rediscovering the Landscape of the Americas,” Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM. Traveled to Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ; Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, TX; Western Gallery; Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, NY; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC. “Landscapes,” Meyerson & Nowinski, Seattle, WA “Movements of Grace: Spirit in the American Landscape,” Winston Wachter Fine Art, New York, NY “Gathered Into Earth,” Sheehan Gallery, Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA 1997 “Elusive Nature,” Cuenca Bienal of Painting, Municipal Building, Cuenca, Ecuador “Art on Paper,” Weatherspoon Gallery, Greensboro, NC Annual Benefit and Silent Auction, White Columns, New York, NY “Landscape: The Pastoral to the Urban,” Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 1996 “The Small Painting,” O’Hara Gallery, New York, NY “Landvermesser,” Mannheimer Kunstverein, Mannheim, Germany “Changing Horizons: Landscape on the Eve of the Millenium,” The Katonah Museum, Katonah, NY Summer Group Show, Robert Miller Gallery, New York, NY 1995 “The Artist’s Camera: Photographs by Contemporary Artists,” Thread Waxing Space, New York, NY “Salut au Monde,” Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, Friesland, The Netherlands “Down the Garden Path,” The Work Space, New York, NY “A Romantic Impulse: Seventeen American Artists,” O’Hara Gallery, New York, NY 1994 “Insights: A Distant View,” Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA “Degrees of Abstraction: From Morris Louis to Robert Mapplethorpe,” Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA “Songs of the Earth: Twenty-two American Painters of the Landscape,” AHI Gallery, New York, NY “Changing Views,” Feigen Incorporated, Chicago, IL “To Enchant (blue),” Cynthia McCallister Gallery and Bixler Gallery, NY “Landscapes…Ideas,” Apex Art, New York, NY “A Woman’s Nature: The Landscape as Seen by Jennifer Bartlett, April Gornik, Joan Nelson, Idelle Weber,” Jan Abrams Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1993 “Les Environs,” Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, New York, NY “Drawing the Line Against AIDS,” Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy “Living with Art: the Collection of Ellyn & Saul Dennison,” The Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ “Rewriting History: The Salon of 1993,” Montgomery Glasoe, Minneapolis, MN 1992 “Magical Mystical Landscapes,” Renée Fotouhi Fine Art, East Hampton, NY “Elemental Nature,” Midtown Payson Galleries, New York, NY “Contemporary Icons—From the Sublime to the Fetishistic,” The Bertha & Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery at Hunter College, New York, NY “Selective Vision,” TransAmerica Corporation, San Francisco, CA “Contemporary Uses of Wax and Encaustic,” Palo Alto Cultural Center, CA “New Viewpoints: Contemporary Paintings by Distinguished American Women Artists,” Seville World Expo ‘92, United States Pavilion “How It Is,” Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, NY 1991 “American Realism & Figurative Art: 1952-1990,” The Miyagi Museum of Art, Miyagi, Japan. Traveled to Sogo Museum of Art; The Tokushima Modern Art Museum; The Museum of Modern Art, Shiga; Kochi Prefectural Museum of Folk Art. “Refiguring Nature,” Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX 1991 Invitational, New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT “Working with Wax: Ten Contemporary Artists,” Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NY “Summer,” Forum Gallery, New York, NY “A Dialogue of Images - Recent German & American Painting,” Galerie Pfeferle, Munich, Germany 1990 “Harmony & Discord,” Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA “The Ten Artists I Was Thinking of on May 3rd, 1990 at 7:00 o’clock,” Witte de With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands 42nd Annual Academy—Institute Purchase Exhibition, American Academy & Institute of Arts & Letters, New York “Von der Natur in Der Kunst,” Wiener Festwochen, Vienna, Austria “This Land is Our Land,” Zoe Gallery, Boston, MA “The Garden,” A/D, New York, NY 1989-90 Romance & Irony in Recent American Art, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. (Traveled to: National Art Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand; Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand; Tampa Museum of Art, FL; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY) 1989 Topology, Fuller Gross Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Painting Beyond the Death of Painting, Kunetsky Most Exhibition Hall, Moscow, USSR Landscape: A Travelogue Painted from Memory, Imagination, or Reality, Ruth Siegel Gallery Ltd., New York Landscape Re-Viewed: Contemporary Reflections on a Traditional Theme, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN Nocturnal Visions in Contemporary Painting, Whitney at Equitable Center, NY RePresenting Landscape, New York Studio School, New York, NY 1988 Jack Barth, Michael Young, Joan Nelson, Blum Helman Gallery , New York Landscape: Common Ground, Jan Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Of Another Nature, Loughelton Gallery, New York Landscape Anthology, Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York 1987 On Paper, Curt Marcus Gallery, New York Between Abstraction & Reality, Greenberg Gallery, St. Louis, MO The Great Drawing Show, Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA New Impressions, Fay Gold Gallery, Atlanta, GA Joe Fawbush Editions: A Selection, Jan Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA The New Romantic Landscape, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Stamford, CT Emerging Artists: Selections from the Exxon Series, 1975-1986, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Fictions: A Selection of Pictures from the 18th, 19th, & 20th Centuries, Kent Fine Art and Curt Marcus Gallery, New York 1986 Art of the East Village, Morris Center, Lafayette College, Easton, PA Small Format, Lang O’Hara Gallery, New York NYC: New York, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE Forum, International Kunstmusee, Zurich, Switzerland Painting and Sculpture Today: 1986, Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN The Manor in the Landscape, Lorence Monk Gallery, New York 1985 Summer Invitational, Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York East Village at the Center, Saidye Bronfman Gallery, Montreal, Canada East Village Artists, Vorpal Gallery, San Francisco, CA Places, Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC Minimal Representation, Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Exxon Emerging Artists Invitational, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY 1984 P.P.O.W Gallery, New York 1982 Nature Morte Gallery, New York Public Collections Brooklyn Museum, New York Museum of Modern Art, New York Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas at Austin Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA Minneapolis Museum of Art, MN National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Joan Nelson paintings are available online from the RoGallery collection.