The next Artist You Need To Know is Bea Nettles.
Nettles is a fine art photographer and maker of artists’ books who often works in more experimental and historical photographic methods.
From the National Gallery of Canada : “Bea Nettles draws on her own life to explore themes of mythology, dreams, femininity, loss, aging, and motherhood. Using mixed media and photography, she masterfully blurs the lines between reality and myth. Combining craft and experimental photographic techniques, she creates photographic objects in which she presents a dreamlike version of her life.”
Nettles earned her BFA at the University of Florida (1968) and then an MFA from the University of Illinois (1970).
She has exhibited widely : Nettles has had more than 40 solo exhibitions in such venues as the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), Light Gallery and Witkin Gallery (both in NYC). A major retrospective of her work – Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory – that began in 2019 at the Sheldon Art Gallery (St. Louis) would tour to the Eastman Museum (Rochester, NY) and the Krannert Art Museum (in 2020).
Nettles was a teacher (in the areas of both photography and artists’ books) at a number of institutions for more than three decades. These include the Rochester Institute of Technology, Tyler School of Art, and the University of Illinois : she is currently Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois. Nettles has been recognized with the ACE Lifetime Achievement Award (2019) and the UIUC Art & Design Distinguished Alumni Award (2020). The International Photography Hall of Fame inducted her In 2023.
From the Philadelphia Museum of Art :
“Bea Nettles was one of a group of photographers working in the 1970s who were interested in experimenting with new materials and different processes. Very often, this included using art-making techniques once associated with women: sewing, stitching, quilting, dyeing, collaging, pleating, and diary-keeping. Although the artist first made the images with a camera, adding these different techniques turned them into unique and delicate objects that often do not look like photographs at all.”
The gallery below is a selection of images from Nettles’ Mountain Dream Tarot series. Nettles has produced several iterations of this work.
From the Eastman Museum text for the aforementioned exhibition Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory: “Bea Nettles explores the narrative potential of photography through constructed images often made with alternative photographic processes….Combining craft and photography, Nettles’ work makes use of wide-ranging tools and materials, including fabric and stitching, instamatic cameras, the book format, manually applied color, and hand‐coated photographic emulsions. Her imagery evokes metaphors that reference key stages in the lives of women, often with autobiographic undertones, and her key motifs draw upon mythology, family, motherhood, place, landscape, dreams, aging, and the passage of time.”
She has published many books (a full listing can be seen here) which are often collections of her work but that also offer an alternate interpretation of her artworks from encountering them in a gallery space : the idea of narrative and storytelling – in both a personal exploration of history but also in a larger sense – have been a factor in her focus on art books. Her artists’ books can be found in special collections libraries at many universities including Yale University.
Her work can be found in numerous collections, including the George Eastman Museum (Rochester, New York), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City), Museum of Modern Art (New York), National Museum of American Art (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.), National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C.), The Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.) and the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, Arizona).
Nettles has received two National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowships and grants from the New York and Illinois State Arts Councils.
You can visit her site here. An insightful and enjoyable conversation with Nettles (from LensCulture) can be read here.