Dona Nelson, Professor
Dona Nelson is Professor of Painting and Drawing at Tyler School of Art,
Temple University, in Philadelphia. Her paintings have been featured in
twelve solo exhibitions in New York City where she moved to participate in
the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 1968. The subject of a
mid-career survey at the Weatherspoon Museum of Fine Art (Greensboro, North
Carolina) in 2000, her canvases are included in the public collections of
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and
the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where she had a solo exhibition at
the Morris Gallery in 1999. Awarded a 2011 Foundation for Contemporary Art
Individual Grant, Nelson is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship
and a grant from the Tesuque Foundation, among others. While Nelson’s
physical approach to large-scale painting, often discussed in the New York
Times, the New Yorker, and Art in America, relates to Abstract
Expressionism, her innovative use of paint and other materials to suggest
figures, landscapes, birds, and architecture has helped her to secure a
singular position within the field.