2024 Corrina Mehiel Fellow
Meet Nancy: (she/they) I am an interdisciplinary artist interested in social infrastructures. I make installations, sculptures, drawings, photographs, video, sound, and participatory works to activate social change. These works are often site-specific and employ writing, typography, symbolic languages, images, and/or found objects as material. A background in design informs the problem-seeking nature of my process and the visual quality of my work. My practice is research-based and multi-modal: I go out into the world to ask others about their expertise or experiences, travel to observe the topic in the world, map systems and power structures, and draw, write, sculpt, perform, photograph, and capture video. In projects, I function as a collector, translator, futurist, collaborator, facilitator, and director. I have explored a range of urgent issues in my work— American politics, climate change, chronic illness, menopause, ageism, and mental health—and often employ social forms (a pop-up gift shop, a demolition derby) to create an alternate reality or new imaginary that invite others to question the status quo and visualize new possibilities. I often work in social and public contexts because I believe in the critical importance of public space, the public sphere, public art, and being with and for others.
How would you describe your community and what sort of encounters with your work do you hope they might experience?
I take the word ‘community’ seriously. I work in so many different subject areas for so many different reasons and I try to work with all kinds of people. Calling anyone ‘my community’ feels uncomfortable, it doesn’t feel like me.
For example, one arm of my practice is in urban waterways and public access to them. I want to engage and work with the broadest community possible. The waterways are important to everyone, especially in New York City. There are decades of rhetoric about how the waterways are polluted, toxic, and dangerous and there’s an inbred belief that the waterways are only for looking or transportation–no one thinks that they can swim in them. There are many communities associated with repair in this work so identifying one depends on the context of the specific project and the location of the project.
Another arm of my practice is aging and ageism. The communities I’m interested in engaging are young adults, ages 18 to 24, and adults who are over 60, but again, that’s intersectional. I want to reach as many people as I can. For me, it’s the specific context of a project that defines a particular community.
The other reason I struggle with this question is because I’ve been struggling with long COVID for the past four and a half years. Part of the way that I’ve been trying to heal myself is moving outside of New York City. It has been healing in one way to be surrounded by trees and a big sky. In another way it’s been really isolating and has accelerated my tendency towards depression. [Living far away from other people] for the past few years [has made me feel] really cut off and isolated from my art community.
What role does curiosity play in your work and what are you curious about exploring in the year to come?
Curiosity is everything in my work and sometimes I also think it’s the problem. I’m curious about so many things to the point where something will cross my attention field and I will be like oh my god this is amazing and that’s why I’m working on so many things all the time.
An early example of curiosity at work: I found myself living in Brooklyn with a view of Governors Island. I realized, it’s so beautiful there. I started researching and found a newspaper piece about Walt Whitman that referenced how there had previously been a sandbar at low tide so you could walk between Brooklyn and Governors Island. Farmers would take their cows to graze over at the island via the sandbar. That image and the curiosity led to four years of trying to build a temporary bridge from brooklyn to Governors Island. I realized that the waterways are a public space just like a plaza, a street, a sidewalk, why can’t we access them? How powerful could it be if people could walk across the water?
Another example: I was talking to one of my closest friends in Portland, Oregon. We were reeling from friends’ stories about menopause—and the confusion, shame, isolation that seemed to come with it…and marveling why is this. And then I asked, what do you know about menopause, and she said, what the TV has taught me. We are educated people but our health education stopped at seventh grade.
From that one conversation I’m now in my eighth year of work. My work on aging and ageism started from how little we knew about menopause and why. The biology of menopause is what it is, we’re going to go through puberty in reverse. However, the thing that makes it feel awkward and uncomfortable is gendered ageism. It was an electrifying experience to start understanding that over the course of this project. We don’t have intergenerational social forms anymore, and I realized that this is where the power is. All I want to do is bring different generations together through different social forms to learn about each other.
I’m working on too many things, all the time. But it’s only because once I have an embodied experience of something and/or the clarity of a vision takes hold, it’s hard to walk away.
Right now, I’m curious about the future of American democracy. Not all politicians—but a lot—seem to be doing politics as sport and the American people are the ball. American democracy is far more fragile than I ever realized. I remember my teenage years where the world felt like a really boring place. I compare that to the students and young people I’m working with right now, the world is a very different place for them. The world now is not boring, it’s anxiety inducing.
I want the world to be different for them, to help them, to support them in making a difference through my actions.
What about the Corrina Mehiel Fellowship or S.O.U.R.C.E. stood out to you or resonated most with you and your work?
I’ve been a fan of Mel’s work since I realized I wanted to make art with other people in the social realm. I made a karaoke ice cream truck with Katie Salen and Marina Zurkow while I was still working a full time design job. That project made a space for people to step into and be in a different way. After that project I realized I wanted to make public art.
I was excited about the fellowship, too, because it was exciting to see that there was a space for me. The space that my work occupies is often so hybrid. I get told a lot of times it’s not art enough or not civic enough. I was excited to realize there was a cultivated space [through the fellowship] for me and other artists to build networks.
The question in the application about process brought a lot of things together for me. So much of the work that I do in service of the artwork never gets seen. It starts in emails and spreadsheets, piles of material and immaterial stuff. It was fruitful to go through some of my favorite past projects and realize I have this great methodology.
MFAs in Design (Virginia Commonwealth University) and Social Practice (California College of Art) inform Nowacek’s research-based practice.
Recent works include videos negotiating expectations of womanhood and the realities of chronic illness exhibited in Oozing Out: All that can be held and cannot hold, a double solo show with Kerri-Lynn Reeves at the University of Iowa (2023), and (Between) Islands, an ongoing participatory intergenerational weight-lifting performance (NYC and Minneapolis). Nowacek installed a flag on the Brooklyn waterfront to address the inaccessibility of the waterways (Ambiguous Truth Blown South South East… 2022) and offered a ceremonial key made of frozen water drawn from the New York City waterways to New York City mayoral candidates (Key From the City, performance and sculpture, (2021)). Commissioned sculptures include Mana Contemporary (Untitled (Monument), 2020) and a permanent concrete sculpture for protest and meditation Franconia Sculpture Park (…Sometimes the Clouds Come Back This Way…, 2019).
A co-founder of Works on Water, Nowacek has worked to support over 100 artists through grants, exhibitions, and a residency program on Governors Island. She has been supported by fellowships with the Jerome Foundation and Eyebeam; and many residencies including the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Recess, Pioneer Works, and Stove Works, and grants from the Brooklyn Arts Council, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs among others. Nowacek served as WACTAC Artist in Residence at the Walker Art Center (2020-2021) and Community Engagement Fellow at Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2022-2024).
