Bea Nettles
Born 1946
ABOUT
Bea Nettles explores the narrative potential of photography through constructed images often made with alternative photographic processes. Combining craft and photography, Nettles’s work makes use of wide-ranging tools and materials, including fabric and stitching, instamatic cameras, the book format, manually applied color, and hand‐coated photographic emulsions. Her imagery evokes metaphors that reference key stages in the lives of women, often with autobiographic undertones, and her key motifs draw upon mythology, family, motherhood, place, landscape, dreams, aging, and the passage of time.
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Bea Nettles was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame on November 3rd, 2023.
The exhibition career of Bea Nettles began when her work was shown in “Photography Into Sculpture,” at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, 1970. Her images have been featured in exhibitions worldwide and regularly reviewed online and in print media; The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Art in America, Art Week, Art News, and several photography magazines in the USA, Italy, Portugal, Australia, England and France.
“Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory,” a fifty year retrospective of her work traveled in 2019-2021 from the Sheldon Gallery in St Louis, the Eastman Museum in Rochester, to the Krannert Museum in Champaign. Due to Covid closures, it was shown a second time at the Eastman Museum. A monograph by the same name was co-published by the Eastman Museum and University of Texas Press.
Nettles has taught thousands of students since 1970. Now Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, she has delivered lectures and workshops internationally and is widely recognized for her innovations in mixed media photography and photographic books.
Numerous public collections contain her work and she has received two National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowships and grants from the New York and Illinois State Arts Councils.