Art Basel Miami Beach 2025: Nan Montgomery

Nan Montgomery’s contributions to the Washington Color School are deeply rooted in a rigorous intellectual and artistic foundation. She studied at Yale in the 1950s under Josef Albers, whose seminal teachings on color interaction profoundly influenced her precise and systematic approach to abstraction. Later, in the 1970s, she deepened her engagement with color and spatial relationships while studying with Washington Color School pioneers Leon Berkowitz, Gene Davis, and Anne Truitt at the Corcoran School of Art. This dual education—melding Albers’ Bauhaus-driven structural discipline with the Washington Color School’s expressive yet methodical handling of color—formed the basis of her mature style.

Montgomery’s work has been included in significant institutional surveys such as Washington Art Matters (American University Museum) and in major solo exhibitions, most recently a 2022 retrospective at the Katzen Arts Center. Yet, despite her deep-rooted connections to key figures in postwar American abstraction, she remains under-recognized within the broader canon of Color Field painting. Recent acquisitions by LACMA and the Hirshhorn Museum confirm the increasing institutional appreciation of her contributions.

The mid-1980s marked a defining period in Montgomery’s practice, during which she synthesized her formal influences into a distinctly personal and innovative approach to color and spatial perception. Montgomery’s paintings from this period demonstrate an intricate interplay between structure and sensation. Building upon Albers’ teachings, she developed a color vocabulary that not only engaged with hard-edge abstraction but also introduced subtle, layered modulations that heightened optical effects. Her compositions frequently feature vertical bands that both stabilize and disrupt the picture plane, creating rhythmic spatial interactions reminiscent of her mentors Leon Berkowitz and Gene Davis.

Montgomery’s sensitivity to structure also finds resonance in the architecture and symbolic order of Washington, D.C. The city’s monuments—with their axial alignments, graduated planes, and reflective surfaces—provided a visual and conceptual framework for her understanding of abstraction. These civic forms, built to enshrine power and permanence, become in her paintings both formal templates and subjects of quiet subversion. Montgomery reimagines monumentality through color and perception rather than mass and stone, translating the obelisk’s verticality or the memorial’s symmetry into rhythms of light and hue. In this sense, her abstraction operates as a kind of feminist rearticulation of the monument: replacing the rhetoric of dominance and historical fixity with one of perception, interiority, and flux. Her work situates itself within a lineage of women artists who transformed the language of formal abstraction into a site for questioning the hierarchies embedded in public space and art history alike.

Unlike many of her Washington Color School contemporaries, Montgomery’s approach was uniquely attuned to the perceptual instability of color and light. Her works exhibit a rare balance of precision and lyricism—combining the systematic rigor of Albers with the emotive depth of Berkowitz and the geometric clarity of Truitt. This places her in dialogue not only with Washington Color School artists but also with broader movements in optical and perceptual abstraction.