With Corner, Dona Nelson depicts an encounter between two construction workers on the streets of lower Manhattan. The Twin Towers loom above and a bright pink car sits to the left. Nelson's more recent work is abstract, and she is known for her physical, broadly gestural use of paint and other materials. A former participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, Nelson currently teaches at TylNelson depicts a quiet encounter between two construction workers on the streets of Lower Manhattan in the 1980s. The gleaming silver towers of the World Trade Center rise above; a boxy pink car parked to the left anchors the scene in the 1980s. Though Nelson is best known today for her abstract paintings, in the late 1970s and early 1980s she turned to figurative subjects drawn from her own experiences of New York. These canvases, painted in a heated, slightly lurid palette, teem with garbage cans and skyscrapers, work clothes and newspapers, figures warming their hands in the streets, doorway drifters, tenement stoops, and high-top sneakers—signs of the times that together evoke a neo-WPA atmosphere.
Nelson studied at Ohio State University and moved to New York to attend the Whitney Independent Study Program. Since then, she has exhibited widely, including the Whitney Biennial and at institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA PS1, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Anonymous Was a Woman grant. Nelson recently retired from her longtime position as a professor of painting and drawing at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture.
er School of Art.
