Nancy Brett is a visual artist from Detroit, currently living and working in NYC. She earned a Master of Fine Arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Wayne State University. In 2016, she was awarded the Individual Support Grant from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and has received Fellowships from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and six Residency Fellowships from Yaddo. Brett's work is in many notable private and public collections including The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, The Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University, The Library of Congress, and The National Gallery in Washington, DC.
For the past six decades, Brett has explored the relationship of thinking, language and image-making. She examines how thought translates into words, symbols, and line and reflects memory and impermanence. Brett's background is in weaving and her work references the weaving process, structurally and metaphorically. Her work builds over time as she works back and forth, applying, drawing through, scraping off, resulting in a surface with visible history. Her text consists of asemic writing, invented hieroglyphs and personal iconography. Her current work explores the intersection of drawing and handwriting, investigating gesture and language.