Nancy Manter

Biography

Nancy Manter was born in Bangor, Maine, in 1951 and grew up nearby in Veazie. She earned a BFA from the University of New Mexico (1975) and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1978), and for many years divided her time between New York City and Bass Harbor, Maine, before settling in the Hudson Valley. Her abstract paintings, drawings and photographs respond to shifting atmospheres, tides, geological surfaces, wind and satellite imagery.

She has made temporary drawings in snow, mud and on fogged car windshields and photographed them, poured paint onto roofing paper, and more recently built layered compositions in Flashe on wood panels. Her artist statement links recent work to living near polluted waterways in Maine, Brooklyn and along the Hudson in Beacon and Newburgh. Solo exhibitions include Water Prayers at Kentler International Drawing Space in Brooklyn (2013) and shows at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, College of the Atlantic and Dieu Donne.

She was included in the traveling survey Blurring Boundaries: The Women of American Abstract Artists, 1936 to Present, and has been a member of American Abstract Artists since 1996. Her work is held by the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the British Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. In 2026 she showed with the weekly painting group in Unframed at Holland Tunnel Revisited, Newburgh.

Practice. Abstract painting (often Flashe on panel or roofing paper), drawing and photography of temporary marks in snow, mud and condensation; themes of weather, water, geology and environmental change.