In addition to being an award winning author and historian, Nell Painter is indeed a painter — and she’ll be displaying and discussing her work (such as ‘Beloved She Saw Her,’ pictured) this Thursday at Brookdale Community College. (Top photo by Robbin Holland)
She’s got a doctoral degree in American History from Harvard; a BS in anthropology from UC Berkeley; fine art degrees from Rutgers and the Rhode Island School of Design. She’s taught History at Princeton, UNC Chapel Hill, and been awarded honorary degrees from Yale, Dartmouth College, SUNY New Paltz, and Wesleyan. She’s been a Fulbright scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities award.
And if that still fails to impress, she arm-wrestled Stephen Colbert on national television.
When author and historian Nell Painter comes to campus on Thursday, December 4, it will be the sprawling Lincroft layout of Brookdale Community College, where the 72 year old Newark resident arrives not as a Visiting Writer, but a Visiting Artist — a celebrated Painter in much more than name only.
The woman who made that name as the author of such acclaimed nonfiction works as The History of White People, Southern History Across the Color Line, and the biography Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol refers to herself these days as the “painter formerly known as the historian Nell Irvin Painter.” Working in both digital and manual media, she “uses found images and digital manipulation to reconfigure the past and to revision herself through self-portraits — creating work that “carries meaning that isn’t stable, for the viewer makes meaning as well as the artist.”
Painter will be discussing her work and her creative process in a 7 pm event sponsored by the Brookdale Arts Society and hosted at the school’s Center for Visual Arts (CVA) Gallery. She’ll also conduct a two-hour private workshop with BCC art students as part of Thursday’s program, which is presented free of charge to the general public. Parking in Lot 2 is recommended for the event, and further info can be had by calling (732)224-2520 or emailing [email protected].
