Latinx Artist Fellowship

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Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez

Mixed Media Artist

Lincoln, Nebraska

By researching historic, Colonial art practices, I aim to recuperate lost knowledge and create art that reflects the past and comments on the present. My intention is to comprehend the past so that I can understand the present and share that knowledge with the viewer.

Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez is a Colombo-American artist with an interdisciplinary practice. Her work investigates the complex intersections of migration, identity, gender, cultural memory, and the effects of colonization. She is creating an intersectional feminist visual novel that is a multifaceted project comprised of paintings, sculptures, objects, and mixed media that together—and in different voices—weave a synchronicity of narratives about hybridity and cultural ownership.

She is in the Elisabeth Sackler Feminist Art Base at the Brooklyn Museum and represented Colombia at the 20 Congreso Internacional: La Experiencia Intelectual de las Mujeres en el Siglo XXI in 2012 in Mexico City. Exhibition highlights include: the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT; the Nerman Museum of Art, Overland Park, KS; the Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio, TX; the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE; La Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador; the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; the Joslyn Museum of Art, Omaha, NE; the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY; and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

She has been awarded the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting, a Nebraska Arts Council Fellowship, a Smithsonian Artist Fellowship, a Puffin grant, a Pollock Krasner grant, and a NALAC grant. She has held residencies at Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia; Art OMI, Ghent, NY; Fountainhead, Miami, FL; the Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, NM; Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY; Gasworks, London, England; the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; and the Bronx Museum for the Arts, New York, NY.

Nancy co-runs FIENDISH PLOTS, an exhibition space in Lincoln, NE with her husband Charley Friedman.

Selected Works

A blue and white ornamented vase has 4 tiers, wide at the bottom and narrowing toward the top with plants, leaves, and vines coming out. There is a bird in the top left and three human-like stick-figures at the bottom of the artwork holding their hands up. The first tier showing the first moment of contact between the Spanish against the Aztecs, the next a picture of an “Indian” mixing his chocolate with a wood mixer, the third with elegant chocolate drinkers lean like Etruscans, and the fourth tier features the cacao plant.

An amber orange vase is in the center bottom frame with illustrations of multi-colored stones overflowing out of it and thin white transparent drawings of flowers and strawberries emanating out. Four snakes weave up the frame, two on each side of the vase. Between the snakes at the top are the words “Screaming isn’t looking” (Text excerpted from a poem by Farid Matuk). There is a light large circle at the top resembling a moon and small insect illustrations throughout.

Two vases, one big one small, both with eyes and features resembling body parts sit at the base of the frame. The larger vase has green eyes and holds tall stems of roses. There are illustrations of some stick figures, foliage, and a sun next to the big vase. The text “A sudden give in our future” (excerpted from a poem by Farid Matuk) angles up on the right side.