Nancy Chunn

Nancy Chunn is an American artist (born 1941) based in New York, New York. Known for her commitment to geopolitical issues, Chunn’s work includes a diverse range of paintings.

Biography

Nancy Chunn was born in Los Angeles, California and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1969, from the California Institute of the Arts, Santa Clarita, California. She began her career in Southern California before moving to New York in the late 1970s, where she currently lives and works.

Chunn has exhibited internationally and has been represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York since 1985.

Chunn currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and taught a master painting class at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles in 2007.

Chunn’s work

Chunn’s paintings commonly expose the political arena and portray the power of the media to define and control public opinion. Her work is mostly painting focused on narrative, cultural references and social problems, history, and symbolism both in the global community. She often uses the news, and famously newspapers to draw inspiration and information, adding her own commentary to these sources. The work she produces is colorful, cartoonish, and laced with humorously dark commentary.

A self-proclaimed “political junkie,” she achieved critical success with her early map like paintings of tyrannized nations and has continued her commitment to documenting world events and the repeating cycle of history in the paintings she has produced since the early 1980s.

She is largely recognized for the yearlong ''Front Pages'' project, where she applied images and text to provide commentary on every cover page of ''The New York Times'' from January 1 to December 31, 1996. In 1997, Rizzoli produced a hardcover book illustrating each of the project’s works.

Chunn’s most recent painting series, ''Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear'', on which she has worked since 2004, focuses on the terrorism crisis in America and the panic it perpetuates. This theme was similarly depicted in her ''9/11'' piece from 2002-2004. Following her 1999-2001 ''News Stories'' series of large-scale paintings based on news-breaking stories, Chunn was credited with inventing “a form of history painting for our time.”

A September 2004 ''Art Price'' article maintains that “during her 25-year career, Nancy Chunn’s consistent subject matter and stylistic diversity conveys a full maturity in her artistic vision. Her works clearly display integration of unique painting techniques, and, through a delicate, modern aesthetic, reveal a complex social conscience, which one can only rarely experience today.”

Awards

Chunn was a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. She was named Honoree of the fall 2007 Jennifer Howard Coleman Distinguished Lectureship and Residency at Otis College of Art and Design. In 2005, Chunn received an Anonymous Was A Woman Award. She has also twice received a Fellowship Award in Painting from the National Endowment for the Arts, namely in 1985 and 1995.

Public collections

* City of Chicago, Chicago, IL
* Ms. Foundation for Women, New York, NY
* Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL
* The New York Times, New York, NY
* The Progressive Corporation, Cleveland, OH
* The Prudential Insurance Company of America, Newark, NJ

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases