Nancy Friese


Nancy Marlene Friese is an American painter, printmaker, and educator. She is known for landscape paintings, and prints which are often colorful. Friese is a professor at Rhode Island School of Design, and an elected National Academician in the National Academy of Design in New York City. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally in 30 solo, and 170 group shows.

Early life and education

She was born in 1948, in Fargo, North Dakota, and was raised in Ohio. Her great-grandparents had a homestead in Buxton, North Dakota.
She holds a BS degree in nursing from University of North Dakota, and an MFA degree in painting and printmaking from Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut. Friese also studied in the graduate painting program at the University of California, Berkeley, and studied both printmaking and painting at the Art Academy of Cincinnati in the late 1970s.

Career

Friese has consistently worked as a plein air artist for much of her career.
"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."

She captures images in watercolor and oil or acrylic paints, with prints created through woodcuts, etchings, drypoints and monotypes, and ties visual observations to experience. The Boston Globe writes about Friese's Long Summer Light as presenting "the bounty of an old tree's vast summer boughs as they stretch over a honeyed field".
A faculty member at Rhode Island School of Design since 1990, Friese has "served as a board member for the College Art Association, the Rhode Island [School of Design Museum|RISD Museum], North Dakota Museum of Art Foundation, FirstWorks Providence, and Buxton in Bloom North Dakota, and she has been a repeat juror with the National Endowment for the Arts, and Japan US Friendship Commission in Washington, D.C.".
In 1990, she was one of three American artists selected as 'Artists at Giverny' to live and paint at Claude Monet's estate in Giverny in Normandy, France, funded by the Reader's Digest.

Collections

Friese's work is held in numerous public collections, including the Boston Public Library; the Florence Griswold Museum, in Connecticut; Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington, D.C.; Muscarelle Museum of Art, in Virginia; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; the New York Public Library; the North Dakota Museum of Art; the RISD Museum in Rhode Island; and the Yale University Art Gallery, in Connecticut, among many others.

Exhibitions

Solo and two-person exhibitions

Group exhibitions