Pixels and Paint: Mixed Media Artist Nancy Jo Ward Debuts at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum

California-based mixed media artist Nancy Jo Ward is bringing her evocative portraits to the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum for Japan’s 23rd International Art Exchange Exhibition from June 15-20, 2024.

Ward creates rich, emotionally resonant figurative art using a hybrid approach that includes digital drawing, painting, and the use of gold and silver foils. Blurring the lines between pixels, paint, and algorithm, she shapes unique images that delve deep into the minds and hearts of her subjects.

Working with a lush color palette, the artist offers archival prints on aluminum, each hand-finished using acrylics, oils, and pastels. The dreamy, vibrant result is alchemic and graceful. Ward manifests poignant, vivid portraits that speak powerfully to the inner depths of her subjects’ spirits while inviting viewers to partake in an intimate and profound dialogue with her subjects. Her passion for color, texture, and movement meshes with a fusion of digital and analog techniques that push beyond conventional artistic boundaries.

Ward’s robust intersection of mediums results in hauntingly lovely works, whose delicacy and depth shape a profound, light-filled grace, one which encourages exploration and transformation within subject and viewer alike. Her images form compelling visual narratives based on contemporary female identities that express emotions ranging from loss and grief to comfort and contemplation.

For the Tokyo exhibition, she will be showing three of her mixed-media works: Taisha, Jesslyn, and Pantsuit Nation, each depicting a compelling female subject in nuanced rainbow shades.

The artist’s fluid and lustrous works will be showcased among those of 57 visual artists from the United States, including images from iconic artists Jackson Pollock and Prince Yisehak Fikre Sellassie. Ward considers it an honor to be included in a “celebration of diversity, cultural specificity, and individual expression of the human condition.” Her own work serves as an intrinsic part of this celebration.

A professor of art and design at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, California, Ward received her Master of Arts with Distinction in Digital Fine Art from the University of the Arts London in 2018. Her hybrid portraiture work has been featured globally in numerous exhibitions; her experimental video Aura won an award at the 13th Concorso d’Arte Donne in Rinascita in Milan, Italy, in March of this year.

The exhibition will be held at: Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 1F Citizens Gallery 3, 8-36 Ueno Park, Taito-ku, Tokyo 110-0007, Japan, from June 15-20. For more information about Ward and her artwork, visit NancyJoWard.com

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