George Nama
American (b. 1939)
Born in Homestead, across the river from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1939, George Nama specializes in abstracted figures rendered in a variety of media that respond to and illuminate the works of writers such as Charles Simic, Yves Bonnefoy and Alfred Brendel. In the 1960’s Nama worked in William Stanley Hayter’s influential Atelier 17 in Paris, as part of an international artistic circle. His first solo exhibition was held in 1963 at the Carnegie Institute Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and since that time he has exhibited at Shepherd & Derom Galleries in New York, Jack Rutberg Fine Arts in Los Angeles as well as in galleries in Brussels, Munich, Japan and Paris, among others. Nama’s works were included in the international art fairs in Maastricht, Netherlands and the Salon du Dessin in Paris. He was elected to and has served on the faculty of the School of the National Academy of Design in New York, where he has mentored and influenced new generations of artists.
Nama has collected, made and painted in books all of his adult life, beginning in Paris in 1966, when he created a book about the Métro that he hand-stitched together. Since that time, he has created more than one hundred unique sketchbooks with found objects bound using vintage book covers or pieces of fabric.
His works are held in the permanent collections of the Boston Athenaeum, Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Butler Institute of American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Morgan Library & Museum, Yale University Art Gallery and the Carnegie Museum of Art.
