Femina Lucida: The Art of Nancy Mee

Femina Lucida: The Art of Nancy Mee is the first major museum survey of Mee’s life work. The exhibition documents the variety of material approaches used by the artist over five decades of her career to interrogate both the personal and cultural construct of the female body. Known for her use of readymade sheets of clear glass, Mee slumps, laminates, stacks, splinters, and layers the glass medium to both explore and celebrate the image of the female body.

Curated by Matthew Kangas, Femina Lucida features Mee’s early works which reveal the artist’s obsession with bodily deformity and “normal” anatomy inspired by her access to unsettling medical records (often grotesque photographs and x-rays) of spinal disorders like scoliosis in adolescent girls. 

Following these works, Mee’s subsequent use of imagery drawn from the Classical Greco-Roman ideal of beauty corrects the bodily distortions: in these works, beauty triumphs over deformity. From the high point of her Classical female figures, Mee continued her artistic inquiry into the perception of the female body through series like the Botanicals, with the metaphorical association of flowers to femininity, and her Chinese pi sculptures, with the direct association of jewelry to the female body ornament. 

The evolution of Mee’s themes of distortion and perfection has spanned nearly 50 years, enhancing the contemporary art tradition in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.