Printmaker's solo exhibit at William Paterson gallery

Wayne - Nancy Campbell, a printmaker and professor of art at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, is currently presenting a one-person exhibit at the Ben Shahn Galleries at William Paterson University in Wayne now through April 24. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free. The exhibit, on view in Ben Shahn’s East Gallery, features a variety of Campbell’s prints, which she develops by overlapping layers of information from a wide range of sources that include medieval Japanese scroll paintings, the media, children’s art, and studies from nature. “I hope to evoke an Eastern sense of balance between fragility and strength by using a system of highly structured intricate abstraction,” Campbell explained. “Despite exacting and often tedious methods I work for a spontaneous result that inhabits an ambiguous realm between the visible and the invisible, the logical and the intuitive, the representational and the abstract.” Implicit in Campbell’s work are stories waiting to be told. “I find conceptual parallels and formal connections to Japanese narrative picture scrolls that I have ardently studied in museum collections and in reproduction,” she said. “Their stories are often evasive, reticent, subtle, and fleeting. The continuous play of opposites that is at the heart of Japanese aesthetics is echoed in my work.“ Campbell was selected to receive the one-person show as the grand prize winner of “American Impressions 2008,” a national juried show of works by professional printmakers held at the Ben Shahn Galleries in spring 2008. Her work has been exhibited widely in national and international exhibitions and is included in numerous public collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, and the Worcester Art Museum. Her prints appear in A Graphic Muse: Prints by Contemporary American Women (1987), a catalogue of an exhibition at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum that documents the contributions that American women artists have made to contemporary printmaking. In 1984, Campbell established the Mount Holyoke College Printmaking Workshop, an artist-in-residence program that brings an accomplished woman artist to campus to create art and to serve as an inspiration for students. For additional information, call the Ben Shahn Galleries at William Paterson University at 973-720-2654.