(1942-2017)
Nancy Wolf published “An Artist’s Perspective on Type” in Ordering Space: Types in Architecture and Design, edited by Karen A. Franck (Assoc. Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark) and Lynda H. Schneekloth (Assoc. Professor at the School of Architecture and Planning, SUNY Buffalo) and published by Van Nostrand Reinhold in 1994. In it she states:
For an artist, questioning the accepted definitions and uses of building type is liberating. This process challenges our understanding of the built environment and our relationship to place and space.
The drawings, paintings, and prints reproduced in this essay are a critique of the changes I have witnessed over the past 20 years in urban forms and spaces in the modern landscape.
As a friend of Bob Coles and Lynda Schneekloth, she visited Buffalo to make studies and photograph the grain elevators and other buildings to use as source materials for her work. A monograph about her work, Nancy Wolf: Hidden Cities, Hidden Longings by Karen A. Franck was published in 1996. Her artwork “presents a visual and social critique of contemporary architecture and the modern cityscape. She reveals the sterility of modernism, the tragedy of recent urban decay, the superficiality of postmodernism, and the possibilities for change offered by deconstructivism.”
Nancy Wolf received a BFA in 1964 from the Rhode Island School of Design and participated in the European Honors Program from 1963-64. Her work is in the collections of the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, FL; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; and Washington, DC institutions including the Corcoran Museum of Art, National Museum of American Art, and Sallie Mae Student Loan Marketing Association.