Nancy Youdelman

Nancy Youdelman was born in 1948 in New York City. She has the distinction of having participated in the very first feminist art class that was taught by Judy Chicago in 1970 at California State University, Fresno. Youdelman continued her studies in the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, where her work was featured in the historic exhibition, Womanhouse, and she received her BFA in 1973. In 1976, she received her MFA from University of California Los Angeles, where, like Chicago before her, she studied sculpture with Oliver Andrews. She currently lives in Clovis, California and teaches sculpture at California State University, Fresno.

Startlingly effective in its ability to elicit feelings of adoration, nostalgia and lost hope, Youdelman’s work centers on the relationships between objects and memory. Her mixed-media assemblages integrate personal artifacts and natural materials with girls’ and women’s clothing. Exalting and concentrating memory, her works recast as sublime the forgotten objects of quotidian experience.

She explains: “A ‘special occasion dress’ can be a powerful metaphor for the cycle of life: new it is fresh and beautiful, worn with pleasure, then put in the closet where it fades and is eventually cast aside, very much like leaves falling from a tree in autumn. I work with actual clothing, transforming it with found objects such as buttons, jewelry, photos, letters, artifacts, sewing articles as well as natural materials: leaves, dried flowers. My desire is to create an expressive artwork that can be beautiful yet disquieting; giving homage to remarkable lives.”

Nancy Youdelman is an authority and lead practitioner in the field of Feminist Art. She has exhibited extensively in solo exhibitions and important group shows. She is the recipient of numerous awards including recent grants from the Pollock/Krasner and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundations and a residency at the Fresno Art Museum. Most recently, she has garnered significant public attention for her work’s inclusion in the exhibition “Nancy Youdelman, Mark Paron, Walter Robinson & Cara Alhadeff” at the Chanel Boutique, San Francisco, sponsored by SFMOMA, Chanel & Vanity Fair.