Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Ceramics, sculpture, drawing
Website: selvinstudios.com
Nancy Selvin was born in 1943 in Los Angeles and studied painting and drawing at UC Riverside before moving to the Bay Area, where she earned a BFA (1969) and an MA in ceramics (1970) from UC Berkeley, studying with Peter Voulkos and Ron Nagle. She emerged in the late 1960s as part of a “second generation” of Bay Area ceramic artists working in the wake of the California Clay Movement, absorbing its emphasis on spontaneity and material honesty while pushing the vessel toward still life and constructed tableaux.
Selvin has lived and worked in West Berkeley for decades, building a 1,500-square-foot studio from salvaged materials in 1985. She taught ceramics at California College of the Arts for many years, ultimately becoming Senior Adjunct Professor, and in 2018 CCA established the Nancy Selvin Award in her honor for undergraduate ceramics majors. Over a career spanning more than fifty years she has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships (1980, 1988), a California Arts Council Fellowship (2003), the Westwood Ceramic National Purchase Award (1980), and UrbanGlass’s First Prize (1998), and she was elected a member of the International Academy of Ceramics in Geneva.
Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, the Oakland Museum of California, the Crocker Art Museum, the Everson Museum of Art, the Mint Museum, the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Kohler Art Center, among others. She continues to exhibit, teach, and serve on the boards of the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts and the American Museum of Ceramic Art.
Selvin’s practice began with hand-built, nonfunctional vessels — oversized teapots and bowls with exaggerated handles and airbrushed, quilt-like surfaces — before evolving, from the late 1980s onward, into still-life “constructions”: tabletop arrangements of minimal ceramic forms, often paired with metal, slate, or drywall, that reference domestic space and architecture. Rather than covering her pieces in glaze, she works largely in underglaze painting, leaving visible brushstrokes and process marks that give the surfaces a gestural, drawn quality; critics have compared the resulting quietude to haiku poetry and to Giorgio Morandi’s bottle paintings.
In more recent series she has folded language directly into the clay — pairing wood-fired tea bowls and terracotta vessels with decal text drawn from dictionary definitions, and building a body of large-scale “trophy” vessels honoring women Abstract Expressionist painters such as Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and Jay DeFeo. Throughout, she has kept one foot in the history of the vessel and one in contemporary abstraction, treating the pot as a vehicle for formal, material, and conceptual inquiry rather than function alone.
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