(L-R) Dan Jian, Calder Kamin, Dr. Mary Nangah, Rachel Nash
The Amon Carter Museum of American Art, a museum in Fort Worth that focuses on 19th and 20th century American art, has named the 2022 participants in its Carter Community Artists (CCA) initiative. Established in 2018, the CCA program annually supports four local artists in building networks and creating art experiences in North Texas. As originally reported by Paula Newtown for Glasstire, “participating artists will make a year-long commitment to be involved in a variety of projects and programs for children and adult audiences, with the flexibility to adapt to each artists’ particular areas of practice and expertise.” The artists are selected by the education staff at the Carter. This year’s cohort includes Dan Jian, Calder Kamin, Dr. Mary Nangah, and Rachel Nash.
Dan Jian is from Lichuan, China and currently lives in Fort Worth. She is an assistant professor at Texas Christian University (TCU), where she teaches drawing. She works between drawing, painting, and animation in her own practice. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in exhibitions in the U.S., China, Italy, and South Korea. She recently had a solo show at TCU’s Moudy Gallery titled And Dust To Mountians. For that exhibit she crafted what the Moudy Gallery described as, “fragmentary and dreamlike stories in otherworldly landscapes” that “merg[ed] interests in cultural memory and the tension between identity and tradition.” She has attended residencies at Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.
Calder Kamin starred in an episode of the PBS series Arts In Context, which can be watched online here. She begins that documentary by saying she is “interested in art that’s more like a verb rather than a noun.” An artist, educator, and advocate, Kamin sculpts animals out of discarded objects. Her work has been shown at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the American Museum of Natural History, Women & Their Work, the DoSeum, the i.d.e.a Museum, Utah MOCA, and The Contemporary Austin. She is on the board of Austin Creative Reuse, an organization that redistributes reusable materials to the Austin community.
Dr. Mary Nangah also teaches at TCU, with joint focus on critical multicultural art education, postcolonial studies and global aesthetics in Art Education, action research, and transformative learning. Dr. Nangah additionally serves as a Diversity Equity and Inclusion faculty advocate for the TCU College of Fine Arts. She has an MFA from Parsons, the New School for Design in New York and a PhD in art education from the University of North Texas, Denton. She is also a painter, and her work was recently featured in the group exhibition Interpreting Renditions of Interaction at TCU’s Moncrief Cancer Institute. The exhibition also feature the work of Carter CCA alum Kalee Appleton. Dr. Nangah is originally from Cameroon.
Finally, Rachel Nash is a painter, licensed professional counselor, and art therapist based in Dallas. She has worked art The Art Station, a Fort Worth art therapy clinic. She is the purveyor of Rachel Nash Gallery, a commercial space that was founded in 2014 and today primarily sells Nash’s own paintings online. According to a press release from the Carter, Nash “is interested in the process of making art, incorporating writing as a way to push her own art, and in the stories that come from this process.”
The CCA program, which went virtual in 2020, plans to shift back to in-person experiences for 2022. More information can be found on the Amon Carter’s website or by searching for the hashtag #cartercommunityartists on Instagram.
