Don Nice

Large-scale Watercolor by Don Nice, Western Rattlesnake, 1988

1988

Don Nice is a classic figure in American art of the past half-century. He burst upon the scene in the early 1960’s when the Whitney Museum of American Art acquired his “American Series #5” and he was recognized as one of the innovative group of “new perceptual realists” who wanted to put content back into painting. Nice integrates a gestured technique gleaned from earlier expressionist and Abstract Expressionist painters with a realist focus and energy derived from Pop Art. Combining a naturalist’s interest in observation with an artist’s compulsion for artistic vision, Nice embraces aspects of popular culture and certain critical issues of our time. He paints classic American products like sneakers, candy wrappers and soda bottles with the same intensity he lavishes on quintessential site-specific landscapes from the Hudson River Valley to the Sierra Nevada Mountains. In doing so he has created a distinctive vision of civilization’s detritus in league with cultural concerns for the environment. Born in California, he studied art in Europe and earned an MFA at Yale, and then established himself in New York City before acquiring a house and studio overlooking the Hudson River in bucolic Garrison. There he has reveled in the painterly gesture and provocative realism for which he is known. He has conjured and created a singular pursuit of new formal ideas and formats in which he visualizes the complicated and often organic interplay between process and product, between that which is common and that which is classic. Over the past 50 years Nice’s work has entered many major public collections world wide including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, the Walker Art Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada and the National Museum of Art in Australia. Nice has had over 60 solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad. And has been included in more than 140 group exhibitions in prominent galleries and museums globally. Nice’s work has been a subject of 4 major publications, including a monograph of the Artist’s life and work, published by Pomegranate Books. In 2018 he was the recipient of The Lee Krasner Award in recognition of a lifetime of artistic achievement for his distinguished career. Though out Nice’s carrier he had a deeply held concern for the environment and collaborated with environmental advocate organizations such as Nation Resource Defense Council, Open Space Institute and the Hudson Highland land Trust to name a few.