Biography

Nina Yankowitz, (b. 1946) in New Jersey, created artworks that BLUR the boundaries associated with painting, sculpture, and craft. Through radical approaches, her multi-media installations have probed the material, political, and sonic nature of abstract art. Early in her career, she was a resident at Group 212 In Woodstock New York; a collective of artists where she collaborated with a musician to create audio for her 1968 draped painting “Oh Say Can You See”.

Yankowitz studied at Temple University and the New School for Social Research before graduating from the School of Visual Arts. She presented significant work in 1969 and 1971 at New York City’s Kornblee Gallery. The Draped Paintings unstretched canvases were compressor sprayed with mists of acrylic paint, offering abstract, atmospheric expanses of color and installed with folds cascadeing vertically down or horizontally along the wall. Her Pleated Paintings were made with running lengths of canvas sprayed with paint, then pressed by pleating machines. Subsequent Dilated Grain Readings are synesthetic experiences using color as visual sound notations for viewers to read along the canvas or linen surfaces. Yankowitz’s early work was the subject of a 2022 solo exhibition at the Eric Firestone Gallery in New York, accompanied by an illustrated catalogue. (Can Women Have One Man Shows?/Nina Yankowitz Paintings 1960s–70s, New York: Eric Firestone Gallery). In 1973 the artist participated in the inaugural Whitney Biennial. During the mid-1970’s Yankowitz joined other women to form a collective to esearch how to help women struggling with identity and equal representation in the work place; later publishing Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. Twenty seven issues were published between 1977 and 1993.

In the 1970s Yankowitz began visiting the East End of Long Island. Her experience of the natural environment and specifically the sounds of birds and insects influenced her work in sound/art. She currently continues to work in the East End and New York City.

Solo or group exhibitions include the Art Institute of Chicago Museum; the Guild Hall Art Museum, East Hampton, New York; the Kunsthaus, Hamburg, Germany; Larry Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut; MoMA PS1, Queens New York; the Museum Quarter in Vienna;and the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York. Collections include The Franklin Furnace/MoMA Artists’ Books Vertical Files Collection; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; the Guild Hall Art Museum, Watermill, Southampton N.Y., and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond Virginia.

Nina Yankowitz: In the Out / Out the In, retrospective opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, St.Petersburg, Florida, 2025 and travels to Parrish Art Museum, Southampton N.Y. She has taught at the School of Visual Arts and University of Massachusetts, Amherst, graduate program, and a visiting instructor at universities across the country. In 2024 she was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame.