Bio 2026
Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez is a Colombo-American artist with an interdisciplinary practice based in Lincoln, NE. Her work investigates the complex intersections of migration, identity, gender, cultural memory, and the effects of colonization. She is creating an intersectional feminist visual novel that is a multifaceted project comprised of paintings, sculptures, objects, and mixed media that together—and in different voices—weave a synchronicity of narratives about hybridity and cultural ownership.
She has had numerous solo exhibitions at institutions including the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Halsey Institute for Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC; Colombus Museum of Art, Colombus, GA; Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR; Patricia and Phillip frost Museum, Miami, FL; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; Queens Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panamá, Panamá; and Museo de Arte Moderno, Cartagena, Colombia. Her works have been collected by the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panamá, Panamá; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Bogotá, Colombia; Museo de Arte Moderno, La Tertulia, Cali, Colombia; Museo de Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia; and Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
She has been awarded the Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2025), US Latinx Artist Fellowship (2025), Anna Rabinowitz Award for Interdisciplinary Collaboration (2023), UMOCA Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting (2019), Puffin Grant (2010), Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2009), and Pollock-Krasner Visual Arts Grant (2001). She has held residencies at the OMI International Arts Center, Ghent, NY (2010), Tamarind Institute Albuquerque, NM (2006), Gasworks, London, England (2001), and Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (2000).
Together with her husband, artist Charley Friedman, Nancy runs FIENDISH PLOTS. FIENDISH PLOTS is an artist-run initiative and exhibition space organized that hosts interdisciplinary exhibitions, salons, critiques of seasoned artists in Lincoln NE and Brooklyn NY.
Statement 2026 - A Visual Novel: Mestiza Dos Veces
I am working on chapters of a visual novel exploring migration, the encounters between Europe and the Americas, and the continuing effects of colonization. My recent body of work comprises large-scale nature morte or still life. These works are inspired by barniz de Pasto—an ancestral resin-based process indigenous to Colombia that was used under the Spanish to mimic Chinese lacquer. Using collage as an interpretation of this practice, I paint, cut, and collage flowers from decorative objects—researched from colonial barniz de Pasto—and place them side-by-side with drones and military figures shooting at plants and animals. I use this juxtaposition of contemporary violence and historically sourced iconography and techniques to explore the colonization of culture and the brutality inherent in it. My work is engaged with the nature of humanity. They emotionally span the gamut, from somber mourning of the destruction of nature and our world, to celebration of the resistance to colonization, and the preservation of cultural memory. I am constantly reckoning with the productive and destructive nature of colonization on the world, culture, and myself the only way I know how: through art, laying my feeling onto paper through the brush.