Mentor: The Unknown Work of Nancy Lee

Form/Space Atelier Program for May 2008

Show Title: Mentor: The Unknown Work of Nancy Lee

Show Duration: May 9-June 8

Opening Reception: May 9, 6-10PM

Seattle artist and much-loved middle-school art teacher Nancy Lee died in 1990, leaving behind a fascinating but virtually unknown body of work. Following the death of her widower, Dr. Robert C. Lee, in 2006, a large number of pieces by the artist were discovered while the Lees’ home of many years was being cleared of their belongings. Mentor: The Unknown Work of Nancy Lee represents a journey by a living artist, Paul D. Natkin, into the work of a deceased artist, Lee, who was his long-time family friend and early mentor. The several works by Lee presented in this show exemplify her passion for a wide variety of materials, from the durable to the ephemeral—including canvas, watercolor paper, paper towels, scrap metal, gauze, cellophane, plywood, watercolor, oil paint, house paint, sticks, clay and mud—and her very intuitive, stream-of-consciousness approach to image-making. The pieces by Lee are shown side by side with copies of biographical documentation and written ruminations on her work by Natkin.

Nancy Erlene (Vandenberg) Lee was born August 13, 1933 in Wichita, Kansas. She was the daughter of William Vandenberg and Elvida (Peluso) Vandenberg. She was raised in the Catholic tradition. In 1955 she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in art education from Wichita State University. She taught at Hamilton Intermediate School in Wichita for two years, circa 1956-1958. She also taught crafts in YWCA camps in Colorado and taught art to children at local YWCAs and Wichita University. In 1958, she was awarded a graduate teaching fellowship in the college of fine arts at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. In May of 1958, her engagement to Robert Charles Lee was announced in the Wichita Beacon. In the same announcement, it was stated that she would work toward a master’s degree in painting and art history while teaching art classes. This course of study was to last two years but was apparently cut short when, in the summer of 1958, she married Robert, and moved to Seattle so that he could pursue a PhD in musicology at the University of Washington. Nancy taught art at the junior high/middle-school level in the Seattle Public Schools. She taught for many years at Madrona Middle School. The Lees lived in Warsaw for a year, 1968-1969, and also spent a year in Budapest, 1971-1972. In both of these countries Robert researched the life and work of composer Franz Lizst. She died March 6, 1990, of lung cancer.

It appears that Nancy Lee's work was not widely exhibited. One of her oil paintings, entitled November Journey, was included in the 47th Annual Exhibition of Northwest Artists, at the Seattle Art Museum, in 1961, and seventeen pieces of hers were exhibited in a show featuring five artists at the University Unitarian Fine Arts Gallery in 1966. (The other artists were Peggy Hatte, Stanley Pipes, Dee Wardall Raible and Lillian Rehbock.) This gallery was founded in 1961 by Dee Raible and Annie Polack. According to a history of the gallery, at the time it was started, there were only four other galleries in Seattle. The gallery showed such artists as Mark Tobey, Guy Anderson, Käthe Kollwitz, Richard Gilkey, William Cumming, Glen Alps, Art Hansen, Robert Fulgham, Alfredo Arreguin, Ray Meuse and Dee Raible (later known as Dee Rainbow). One of Lee's paintings in this show, Early Summer, was mentioned in a review in the Seattle Times, Sunday, March 27, 1966, by the Times art reviewer, Anne G. Todd. According to a resume for Lee in the notes of Annie Polack, who directed the gallery for twenty-some years, Lee's work was included in juried exhibitions in Kansas and Indiana, but records of these exhibitions have not yet been located. In concluding her history of the University Unitarian Fine Arts Gallery (this history, along with her notes, now housed in Special Collections at University of Washington’s Suzallo Library), Polack lamented the disappearance of artists who were "very talented, competent and already known" from the "scene," particularly women. She attributed the problem to "too much other work" or "no money and having to work on other things as their work would not support them." Lee was prolific but does not appear to have shown much—maybe for the very reasons Polack listed. It is the curator's hope that over the course of this show, more information about Nancy Lee's life, career and work will come to light. If significant information does surface, it may be incorporated into the exhibition during the weeks that it is on view.

Curator’s Statement

In 2007 I encountered a large body of work, previously unfamiliar to me, by my old friend and early artistic mentor Nancy Lee. Discovering this work, I came to appreciate her capabilities on a new level. Although I had known her for close to three decades before her death in 1990, I had not fully understood the depth and range of her work.

I remember visiting Nancy and her husband Bob with my family when I was a young boy. The Lees lived in Montlake in a little white house surrounded by a low white picket fence. While the others sat talking in the living room, Nancy invited me to go down to the basement with her to see her studio. She said she wanted to show me her “Holy Rock.” We went down the stairs, and she picked up a little box from her work table in the middle of the room. She opened the box slowly, a gleam in her eyes, as though it contained something very mysterious and precious. “This,” she exclaimed, “is my Holy Rock!” She took out a beach pebble with a hole through the middle of it. This was my first visit to an artist’s studio.

Whenever we got together with the Lees, Nancy wanted to see my artwork. She would go through great piles of my paintings and drawings with me, making perceptive comments on each piece. She was a natural teacher, very sensitive to a young person’s tender ego. I recall how deftly she offered me a piece of advice on one occasion, referring not to my work, which lay in front of us, but to her own: “Anytime I’ve ever tried to copy nature,” she said, “I’ve failed.”

Nancy was my mentor and no doubt the mentor of countless other young people. But who were her mentors? I have thought about this a lot since recently becoming better acquainted with her work. Unfortunately I have not yet succeeded in determining the names of her teachers at the various schools she attended, let alone the name of any individual occupying that very special position of mentor—that is, someone who not only gives instruction but serves as a role model or wise and trusted counselor.

Nevertheless, judging from Lee’s collections of postcards and art books, and her work itself, we can draw some conclusions about the well-known artists who probably influenced her. She must have done a lot of looking at Kandinsky, Braque, Picasso, Ernst, Miro, Masson, Schwitters, Klee, Dubuffet, Gorky, de Kooning, Pollock, Motherwell, Kline, Mitchell, Frankenthaler, Rauschenberg, Twombly and other artists whose work would probably have been dicussed at the schools she attended. Her frequent use of unusual, often ephemeral, materials can be linked to the work of Picasso, Braque, Ernst, Arp, Schwitters, Rauschenberg and the Arte Povera artists. Her untitled collage with a plywood disk painted white and black (date unknown), for instance, bears at least some superficial similarities to Rauschenberg’s Bed, 1955, although Lee’s piece does not involve the vertical placement of an object that is typically horizontal, as Rauschenberg’s famously does. The similarity between the two pieces has more to do with the layering of textures and the combination of paint from the tube and found materials that they share. Lee made use of a very wide range of materials, from fine watercolor paper and printing papers to colored construction paper, paper towels, magazine pages, gauze, housepaint, ticket stubs and newspaper clippings in various languages, masonite, scrap metal, string, sticks, clay and mud. However, her relationship to these famed artists never comes across as slavish imitation, adulation or self-assigned apprenticeship. She moved from one influence to another with spontaneity and a light touch, keeping her emotional integrity and ultimately creating something unmistakably “Nancy Lee.”

To appreciate Lee’s work we must look not only to the giants of art history but also to the visual vernacular of the period in which she was active. In particular, we see in many of her pieces the esthetic of the late 1960s and early 1970s—the visual world of the University District street fair, with its gaudy candles and elaborate macramé plant holders, or the groovy sets of TV programs of the period, such as Laugh-In and the Dating Game. However, Lee’s version of this esthetic is much more—its highs much higher and lows much lower. Orange, fuchsia, scarlet, turquoise, purple, ultramarine, aqua, golden yellow and black—these were all her friends, but in her best pieces the colors are carefully calibrated to convey a sense of passion and emotional fragility not to be found in this contemporary cultural material at large. In her tie-dyed cloth pieces she elevates a technique most commonly associated with prosaic, if “psychedelic,” T-shirt decoration to a world of powerful emotions.

It is also worth mentioning that both Nancy and Robert Lee loved folk art and the art of small scale societies (“tribal” art). They had many interesting encounters with traditional artists and the decorated their home with many things from around the world, in an unusual way to which I cannot do justice in words. This passion for the variety of the globe’s cultures and their artifacts is also reflected in Nancy’s work. I should also add that she owned many objects that speak of her Catholic background, although to my knowledge she was not a practicing Catholic later in life. She had, for instance, a collection of votive cards from her mother’s funeral, and a little plastic statuette of the Virgin Mary inside a rounded wooden compartment that opened and closed. Although there is no specifically Christian imagery to be found in her work, there is certainly a penchant for the iconic—interspersed with the purely abstract.

In my mind’s eye, I see Nancy Lee wearing jumbo-sized sunglasses and a funky headscarf, an “ethnic” purse slung over her shoulder and a string of big seashells or shellacked macaroni dangling from her neck. She was a very responsible person, always gracious and dedicated to helping others. But she had an otherworldly aura about her, a certain childlike innocence and vulnerability. For me, she was a walking artwork, a white rabbit ready to lead me down the rabbit hole to a realm of brightly-colored dreams.

My encounter with Nancy Lee’s work almost two decades after her death and my deepened appreciation of her creative output has lead me to ponder many questions about the passage of artistic practice from one generation to another. I hope that her unique vision will not be forgotten and that it will have an impact on generations to come. May this exhibition be a celebration not only of her life and work but of the role all mentors play in leading us forward!