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Artist Nansi Lent on Sigils, Scrolls, and Asemic Writing

Episode 249: Artist Nansi Lent on Sigils, Scrolls, and Asemic Writing

Asemic-writing artist Nansi Lent talks fragile paper, sigils, five decades of "longing," a laundromat love story, and a very busy fall of shows.

Show notes

Norm sits with artist, curator, and arts administrator: founder of WomensWork.Art, a past board member of the National Association of Women Artists, and an incredibly thoughtful creative soul who works in asemic writing, Nansi Lent.

Norm and Nansi talk through what asemic writing actually is (non-semantic, illegible-on-purpose mark-making with roots in Dada and a global following since the '60s and '90s), and how Nansi backed into it in 2018 through journaling before "discovering" she'd invented her own visual vocabulary of scrolls and sigils. She talks about her wildly busy fall: 19 new pieces on fragile Japanese tea and gampi paper for a show at Cornell Creative Center for the Arts timed to Kingston Arts Week, ten pieces at Bank Street Newburgh, her annual Art Studio Views open house over Labor Day weekend, and a solo show, "A Thread of Longing," opening in October at BAU that spans five decades of her work. Along the way: her early career as a documentary and darkroom photographer printing for Martha Swope, a formative (and brutal) run through Ivan Karp's gallery world, a rocky stint in an MFA program at SUNY New Paltz, adopting her two children as a single woman, and how she met her husband while stalling in a laundromat on the Upper West Side.

Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org

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Nansi Lent

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