Nancy Dwyer's last artist's talk at the original Hallwalls, 30 Essex Street, March 8, 1980.
In conjunction with the opening of her solo exhibition at Nina Freudenheim Gallery (Saturday evening, September 9, 6:00-8:00 p.m.), Hallwalls is pleased to welcome back to Buffalo—and to Hallwalls—one of our founding group of artists, Nancy Dwyer.
After starting her college art education at SUNY New Paltz in 1972-1974, Dwyer transferred to SUNY at Buffalo (UB) in 1974-1976, where she graduated with her B.F.A. in 1976. While a student in Buffalo and briefly thereafter, she joined the small group of artists who started Hallwalls, participated in the legendary group show Noise in June 1976 ("exhibition conceived as a report card of Hallwalls founding group's first year of activities"), and had her first solo show at Hallwalls March 31-April 15, 1977, titled Thick and Wordy Paintings. Later the same year (November 6-27, 1977) Dwyer was included in the small group exhibition of six artists "associated with Hallwalls" selected by Helene Winer, then director of the nonprofit Artists Space, that first introduced these artists' work to the New York City art world. (Besides Dwyer, the show at Artists Space also featured Diane Bertolo, Charles Clough, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, and Michael Zwack. Helene Winer went on to co-found Metro Pictures in SoHo in 1980 with Janelle Reiring.) After moving to NYC herself, Dwyer returned in 1980 as a visiting artist for her second solo show at Hallwalls—Recent Work by Nancy Dwyer (March 7-30, 1980) and to give a visiting artist's talk on March 8. She was also featured in the 1980 touring exhibition Hallwalls: Five Years, which after Buffalo (November 1979) traveled to A Space in Toronto (February 16-March 8, 1980) and the New Museum in New York City (June 19-July 18, 1980).
In the intervening 37 years, Dwyer has had a distinguished career, including dozens of solo exhibitions, hundreds of group exhibitions (notably including the New Museum's 1994 Bad Girls, curated by Marcia Tucker, and Laughter Ten Years After, which featured works by twenty artists, including Dwyer, Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Guerrilla Girls, Carrie Mae Weems, and Jenny Holzer, and which toured North America for three years, 1995-1998), and public art commissions and artist's residencies across the United States and around the world. Recent major solo exhibitions in New York City include the 30-year retrospective Nancy Dwyer: Painting & Sculpture, 1982-2012 at Fisher Landau Center for Art (January 18-April 7, 2013) and Nancy Dwyer at Sandra Gering Gallery (January 20-February 28, 2015). A large selection of her early work was featured in The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (April 21-August 2, 2009).
In addition to her season-opening solo show at Nina Freudenheim Gallery, Dwyer's work can currently be seen locally at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in the Center's 50th-anniversary show, 50 in 50 (July 14-September 24, 2017), and at the Castellani Art Museum in Western New York Collects: Nancy Dwyer (September 17, 2017-February 4, 2018).
Nancy Dwyer is a professor of sculpture at the University of Vermont in Burlington (2004-present). In addition to her B.F.A. from UB (1976), she earned her Master's Degree in Interactive Telecommunications from NYU in 2002.
P.S., 9/7/17: Here is a downloadable PDF of the catalogue from the Hallwalls: 5 Years touring show mentioned above, featuring Nancy Dwyer and including the 5-page essay (in effect, Hallwalls' first published history) by Linda Cathcart (1947–2017), whose recent death, sadly, we just learned about this week.
