Nemeth Art Center Artist Reception – Phyllis Bramson and Nate Young

Celebrate the work of Phyllis Bramson and Nate Young at a special reception honoring their latest collections. Enjoy an evening of art, conversation, and refreshments as the artists share insights into their creative process and inspiration.

Phyllis Bramson’s paintings include elements of collage and assemblage, and inspire feelings of childlike wonder, longing, heartbreak, frustration, and delight. Inspired by 18th-century Rococo, Chinoiserie, Chinese Pleasure Garden paintings, French artists Boucher and Fragonard, and American Henry Darger, fairy tale illustrations, erotic bedtime stories, and knick-knack kitsch, many of Bramson’s paintings are reactions to romantic events–the courting, the longing, the risking, the coupling, and every unpredictable event in between. Refusing to separate matters of taste from larger questions about “good behavior,” her work nods to decorum but exposes its more colorful underside with wit, theatrics, and subtle innuendo.

A recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and multiple NEA fellowships, Bramson has an extensive exhibition history. Beginning with The New Museum in 1979, she has shown at the Smithsonian Institution, The Chicago Cultural Center, Smart Museum, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, WI, Littlejohn Contemporary in New York, and Phyllis Kind, Carl Hammer, Zolla/Lieberman, and Engage Projects galleries in Chicago. A longtime Professor of Studio Art at both the University of Illinois at Chicago and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Bramson lives and works in Chicago, keeping a studio and an apartment in the same loft building, on different floors.

Nate Young works across media, creating sculptures, works on paper, and installations that engage with issues of race and racialization. Using diverse materials (wood, glass, pencil and paper, bone, and sound, among others) his work explores the systems and objects that impact one’s beliefs. Often addressing theological themes through text and architectural elements, Young strips away any specific content, leaving behind a universal lexicon of primordial signs and symbols. These arrows, circles, grids, and negative spaces strongly suggest meaning without in fact conveying it; a profound void, at once empty and full, invites the viewer’s activation. This quiet gravitas and austerity, at odds with the work’s meticulously hand-crafted nature, prompts a post-minimalist interrogation of authority, material, and the artist’s hand.

Young has exhibited nationally at museums and galleries, including MASS MoCA, MA; The Studio Museum, Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Visual Arts Center, Richmond, VA; Front Triennial at the Cleveland Institute of Art, and moniquemeloche gallery, Chicago. His work is in the collections of MOCA, Chicago, DePaul Art Museum, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, Milwaukee Art Museum, the Walker Art Center,  and the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C. A co-founder of the experimental gallery The Bindery Projects (Minneapolis, 2011-2016), Young is currently Assistant Professor of Art at University of Illinois at Chicago, and lives and works in Chicago.