John McNamara (artist)
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0c/Congestion_by_John_McNamara%2C_1985.jpg)
John McNamara (born 1950) is an American artist who was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1971 with a BFA in painting and in 1977 with an MFA. In 1975, he began teaching painting at the Massachusetts College of Art and remained there until 1983.[1] He received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1981. Since 1993, he has taught at University of California, Berkeley. He currently lives in Novato CA with his wife, educator and writer Diane Darrow and sons filmmaker Jeremy McNamara and musician Seamus McNamara.
John McNamara's paintings from the 1980s and 1990s are abstract landscapes.[2] Congestion, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, is an example of the artist's abstract landscapes that have been described as both sensual and painterly.[3] Although superficially resembling abstract expressionism, vegetation is clearly present. In 1992, McNamara began investigating the relationship between painting and photography by affixing photographs and postcards to canvas or wood panels and then proceeding to paint over them.[4][5] The Boston Public Library, the Davis Museum and Cultural Center (Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA), the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park (Lincoln, MA), the Fitchburg Art Museum (Fitchburg, MA), the Honolulu Museum of Art[6] the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Rose Art Museum (Brandeis University, Waltham, MA), the Smith College Museum of Art (Northampton, MA), the Currier Museum of Art (Manchester, NH), the Speed Art Museum (Louisville, KY) and the Tucson Museum of Art (Tucson, AZ) are among the public collections holding work by John McNamara.
References
[edit]- Baker, Kenneth (April 21, 1981). "Seeing Is Believing: John McNamara's Maximum Space". The Boston Phoenix. Retrieved 8 March 2024.
- Baker, Kenneth (March 23, 1982). "Abstracting reality". The Boston Phoenix. Retrieved August 10, 2024.
- Lafo, Rachel Rosenfield, Nicholas Capasso & Jennifer Uhrhane, Painting in Boston: 1950–2000, Lincoln, Mass., DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, 2002, p. 231.
Footnotes
[edit]- ^ John McNamara in AskArt.com
- ^ Stapen, Nancy, "John McNamara", Artforum International, July 8, 1988, p. 121
- ^ Stapen, Nancy, "John McNamara", Artforum International, July 8, 1988, p. 121
- ^ John McNamara on sexandthesite.wordpress.com, March 9, 2012
- ^ Fischer, Kimberly, "John McNamara Art Exhibit", Stan State News (California State University, Stanislaus), Dec 11, 2017
- ^ Congestion by John McNamara, 1985, oil on canvas, accession 2018-5-36
- Artists from Cambridge, Massachusetts
- Massachusetts College of Art and Design alumni
- Massachusetts College of Art and Design faculty
- 20th-century American painters
- American male painters
- 21st-century American painters
- American modern painters
- American abstract artists
- Painters from Massachusetts
- University of California, Berkeley faculty
- 1950 births
- Living people
- 20th-century American male artists
- American artist stubs