Lincoln-based artist Nancy Friedemann-Sanchez and Charley Friedman were our scheduled speakers at Lincoln South Rotary Club on September 16, 2022. Due to limited time, we heard only about Nancy's journey and her collections.
Nancy shared information about her parents and grandmother. It was easy to see how they influenced her artistic passion.
Her father was in the military stationed in California. Using the GI Bill, he had an opportunity to study in Mexico. Her mother was an anthropologist. While pursuing her studies in California they met and were married. Her mother wanted to return to Colombia.
Her father, an artist, had fallen in love with everything about Mexico and thought that Colombia would be similar but soon learned that was not true. But, he soon felt the same passion about Mexico - from the indigenous people history, the culture, folk art – and created a business around all of these expressions.
Nancy found herself spending time with her mother as she was doing field work. There were times when her mother was working on writing up the findings of the work at the National Museum. She would send Nancy off to explore the exhibits while she was doing that paper work. Nancy was exposed to all of the history of and would see the artists’ visions of how things came to be - a vision of native culture.
Then there was her grandmother who provided her with a strong space to develop her thoughts. She had room to spread out her threads and wools and her grandmother taught her how to knit and to sew.
Nancy shared that, when she moved from New York to Nebraska it was a shock to her - she wasn't surrounded by her friends, she wasn't in a tiny apartment. Instead she was living in an area that had great open spaces. The culture of the Midwest vs. New York was also an adjustment. As she was going through this transition she thought about how to express this. If she was a writer, she would do a novel. So, she embarked on creating a visual novel.
She titled the work Mestiza Dos Veces. You can read about this extensive work and view the pieces at https://www.nancyfriedemann.com/mestiza-dos-veces--a-visual-novel.
Here are some of the images that Nancy shared with us. They were influenced from her study of lace and the translations of novels and short stories, creating her art with very small brushes and spending many hours.
Nancy is an abstract expressionist. How she transfers her thoughts through art is an internal process that may be hard to understand.
To view Nancy's work and read her artist's statement, you are strongly encouraged to visit https://www.nancyfriedemann.com/.
BIO as introduced at the meeting - click here.