Nancy Haynes

Nancy Haynes (born 1947) is an artist living and working in Red Hook, Brooklyn. She was born in Waterbury, Connecticut and shares her time between living in Red Hook, Brooklyn and the Huerfano Valley in Colorado.

Haynes is a conceptual artist. Her art-historical influences cite Marcel Duchamp, Mondrian, Dan Flavin and Ad Reinhardt, but as Marjorie Welish noted in her essay, “Nancy Haynes, A Literature of Silence”, Haynes’ also has influences from literature. Welish states:

“Nancy Haynes has produced a series of breath-taking monotypes inspired by the work of Samuel Beckett. That her admiration for him is long-standing comes as no surprise to those viewers familiar with her painting. She is aesthetically in accord with Beckett's assumption of "the divine aphasia," or speechlessness, against which mark-making is inadequate (That Which Memory Cannot Locate, 1991-92). She evidently admires that same impulse toward (the Heideggarean) "inadequacy of language" in art other than her own (Robert Ryman's own homage to Beckett's, Ill Seen Ill Said, with its barely voiced "th" inscribed in illustration, for instance). Cognizant of Vladimir and Estragon's cosmic fretfulness, she conducts her own forays into elegant stuttering on the visual plane.”

In Haynes’ recent paintings, the canvases began to “evolve from a paler shade of a given pigment to a darker one, creating a horizontal movement that pulls the eye toward an unseen source of light.”

More notable works include her autobiographical color charts series (2005-2013), which employ swatches of color contained within grids, meant to give an autobiography of the artist.

Selected solo exhibitions

• 2000 Between Two Appearances, Stark Gallery, New York
• 2002 Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna, Austria
• 2006 Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna, Austria
• 2009 dissolution, Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York
• 2010 “Selected Small Paintings“, George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco
• 2012 “Recent Paintings", George Lawson Gallery, Los Angeles

• Johnson, Ken (March 6, 2009). "Art in Review: Nancy Haynes". The New York Times. 
• Baker, Kenneth (May 15, 2010). "Haynes is worth getting to know". San Francisco Chronicle. 
• Ollman, Leah (October 22, 2012). "Art review: The sensual intelligence of Nancy Haynes". Los Angeles Times. 

Haynes has been awarded by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 1995, The National Endowment for the Arts in 1987 and again in 1990, and the New York Foundation for the Arts in 1987.

Her work is in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hood Museum of Art in Dartmouth, NH, The Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, the Denver Art Museum, Haags Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, Holland, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, TX, The Ackland Museum, in Chapel Hill, NC, The Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, VA, The Rose Art Museum at Bradeis University in Waltham, MA, The Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, The San Diego Museum of Art, The Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA and the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA, among many others.