MONTCLAIR, New Jersey — A famous line from Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel Things Fall Apart is, “If you don’t like my story, write your own.” That sentiment is particularly poignant for artist Nanette Carter, who used the book’s title for one of her earliest works, which she created while attending graduate school at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. The piece is currently on display in her retrospective at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey. Walking through the layered exhibition, you can see how she internalized those words.
Carter’s history with Montclair is deep. Her father was the town’s first Black city councilor, and later mayor, in the 1960s, and in the 1980s he would become the Montclair Museum’s first Black board member. Montclair, for those not familiar with the New York City area, is known as a very liberal, multicultural, and sophisticated hub that has given rise to high-quality arts and educational institutions in addition to a lively culinary culture and architecturally significant houses. It was also home to many artists in the 19th century, including George Inness, a lineage that Carter and others continue by maintaining local connections, even if she crossed the Hudson River decades ago to settle in Manhattan.
It’s rare nowadays to find an art museum that nurtures local artists, particularly those who grew up nearby; most institutions tend to recycle the same darlings of auctions and galleries. Thankfully, the Montclair Art Museum is an exception, and they are even working with a curator who has extensively curated local talents.
The artist’s first studio was her childhood bedroom. Some early works made there, including a few from her time at Montclair High School, are on display. There’s a sense of play in these pieces. A number of the earliest pieces feature eggs, such as “Egg and basket” (1971) and “Egg in Bowl” (c. 1971–72), in which perfect forms float in space and the world is flattened into two-dimensional shapes. In these paintings, you can also see her nascent fascination with fragile states, as well as balance and metaphor. In both, shadows congeal to take on a solidified character, almost competing with the objects themselves, and in “Egg and basket” the container’s shadow turns into a squash-like form. Soon, shadows would completely disappear in her work, and the black shadow-like forms that emerge as a reaction to light take on their own autonomy. Light, like shape and texture, feels central to her art.
In other works, you can see the influence of her artist circle, called the East End artists group, which centered on a loose network of African-American artists living in the SANS neighborhood (an acronym for a historically Black beachfront community in the east Hamptons, namely Sag Harbor Hills, Azurest, and Ninevah Subdivisions). Among that crew were Rosalind Letcher, Al Loving, Frank Wimberley, Richard Clarke, and many others. It’s easy to discern the artistic dialogue Carter had with her peers, including the collage work of Wimberly and the love of unframed strips of color that dominates so much of Loving’s wall pieces. Like them, she relishes the abstract, which was not always a popular notion in Black American art circles. Curator Kimberli Gant, who contributed to the catalog, writes, “Those artists who wanted to experiment with nonfigurative styles were criticized by their peers for not advocating for Black communities, especially during the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s. Author Ron Karenga, for example, stated that ‘all art must reflect and support the Black Revolution, and any art that does not discuss or contribute to the revolution is invalid.’” Carter, like her peers, saw it another way.
Carter has called herself a “scapeologist,” as she renders various types of scapes or space (landscape, skyscapes, seascapes, outer space, or the inner spaces of the body), but she often removes the conventions of horizon and sky so that they are fully abstract. She refuses to turn her art into windows, pushing us to focus on what is directly before us.
A deep sense of optimism undergirds so much on display. Her Illuminations series (1984–86), influenced by her first time in Rio de Janeiro and its rich festival culture, glows like a mardi gras float, while the elegance of the Containment series (1994), which is rendered in black and white, shines through, creating order out of chaotic elements that appear to be pushing beyond their allotted space.
The real turning point toward a fully matured artistic vocabulary appears to be her Bouquet for Loving series (2009–12), which was created soon after Loving’s death. The first Black artist to get a solo show at the Whitney Museum, back in 1969, he was not only Carter’s friend, but a major mentor. In the 1970s, the same period as when Carter was finding her own artistic vocabulary, Loving turned to canvas wall sculptures, for which he was best known. Mary Birmingham, who curated the current retrospective, sees Loving’s change in direction as a response to the Vietnam War and the rise in the spectacle of anti-Blackness during the Civil Rights movement. Birmingham writes in the show’s catalog that Carter learned from Loving, and she “came to believe that abstract art can reflect the time in which it is created.” In her resulting work, images of Black people are never on display, unlike so much of the figurative work of the era. Rather, it is sublimated into the forms, sometimes hinted at, but never obvious — we work to see the art without being able to easily categorize it. Although you can see the breakthroughs start to pool in her slightly earlier series Aqueous (2006–8), in which elements begin to feel more liberated, but are sometimes confined by boundaries and borders, it’s in Bouquets that forms break free of borders and writhe and dance with ultimate freedom.
In “Bouquet for Loving #8” (2009), the forms take on a mask- and flame-like quality, making palpable the warmth of that artistic relationship between Carter and her mentor. The shape ignites with the double entendre that the word “loving” evokes, showing us a lively arrangement bound by a strong emotion. These works use her now trademark mylar, a material she first discovered in the 1980s, during an exhibition of architectural drawings at the Copper Hewitt Museum, before fully embracing it a decade later. The flat, colorful, and patterned quality of the material is a natural fit for Carter, who often shucks frames to place the work directly on the wall, something that suggests the influence of Loving. She uses that direct and unhindered relationship with the viewer to give the work a sense of immediacy.
In one of the show’s largest and most recent works, titled “Afro Sentinels III” (2024), you can sense that something is still opening up for Carter. It is one of the only works that appears to directly quote from African historical art. In this series, totemic forms are stacked atop one another; together, they comprise a row of “warriors,” as they’re described in the catalog for the show, that are guardian figures for people of color everywhere. Carter sees them as akin to the terra-cotta soldiers protecting the tomb of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang (250–210 BCE). “No matter the scale, girth, or color, each sentinel has the strength and acumen to halt all negative forces. These soldiers are fictional constructs that speak to the need for parity and humanity in the world,” she noted about the series in a catalog for her 2018 exhibition in Cuba.
In another part of Achebe’s landmark novel, he writes, “He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.” It is a line spoken by Obierika, a close friend of the protagonist, Okonkwo. The “he” refers to the White colonizers, particularly the British, and their imposed systems that disrupted the traditional Igbo culture. Like Achebe’s character, Carter is an observer of the world and its shortcomings, yet her language doesn’t lament, but renews.
In her contribution to the catalog, the artist explains that her early artmaking was influenced by her mother’s work with children and teens in the local area, where the elder Carter not only taught dance but helped to create costumes. From the outset, Carter saw how art could bring together parts that may otherwise seem disparate to make things whole, and it’s obvious from this exhibition, which celebrates that careful balancing act.
Nanette Carter: A Question of Balance continues at the Montclair Art Museum (3 South Mountain Avenue, Montclair, New Jersey) through July 6. The exhibition was curated by Mary Birmingham.