Nancy Roberts

I’ve enjoyed a long academic career, teaching history and writing at universities and, earlier, courses in the history of early American vernacular architecture and material culture (at the University of Minnesota). Intensively studying the latter in graduate school helped me realize how compelling I’ve always found the visual world, as did a drawing class I took in 1975 while an undergraduate at Swarthmore College and then photojournalism courses at the University of Minnesota.  Over the years I’ve designed many informal cottage gardens and published numerous photographs to accompany my magazine articles.

Creating mosaic art seems to bring together many of my favorite things, such as the richness of color and form with sculpture’s tactile aspect.  In some ways it helps me recapture the joy I felt as a small child, when my artist mother used to take my sisters and me to Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute in Utica, where in the children’s area we would play for hours with brightly colored translucent  geometric forms that we arranged in endless designs on a backlit transparent board. I hope that the viewer of my work will experience at least some of that sense of delight that still motivates me.