Nanette Carter Is a Pioneer of Black Abstraction—and She’s Still Experimenting Today

When she was in high school, Nanette Carter walked into the Guggenheim on a field trip to see the 1971 Piet Mondrian retrospective unfurling along the museum’s spiraling gallery. The experience was revelatory. “It was a flash that someone could change so drastically and create a type of art that no one had ever seen before,” she said in an interview in her studio, an apartment in Washington Heights where the artist has worked since 1981.

Carter comes from the lineage of Black American abstractionists but has long carved out a distinct path, particularly with her experimental use of materials. Her studio bears witness to this restless practice: rolls of Mylar, the industrial polyester film that has become her signature, lean against the wall; older reliefs in metal and wood are mounted in the studio’s long hallway; half-erased pencil sketches cover the main room, mapping out her complex abstract forms. Scattered among them are reminders of her long, evolving career, from ambitious abstractions done at the Triangle Workshop in 1991 to the small ceramic Cheeks, a sculpture she made as a teenager in the late 1960s and early ’70s at Montclair High School in New Jersey, just outside New York City. Now, at 71, Carter is experimenting with three dimensions in different contexts, introducing new steel sculptures.

“I wanted to come off the wall for years,” Carter told me, as she prepared to travel to her birthplace, Columbus, Ohio, to install a major solo exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts. “Afro Sentinels,” on view through January 11, 2026, brings together her signature wall-based abstractions while debuting her first freestanding “Afro Sentinels.” The exhibition caps a remarkably active stretch for the artist: Earlier this year, she was the subject of a retrospective at the Montclair Art Museum. This follows solo shows at New York’s Berry Campbell Gallery in 2022 and 2024. Justice, community, and the turbulence of contemporary life surface throughout her practice. Today, she’s confronting what she calls the “seismic changes” of the past decade.

Born in Columbus, Carter recalls how “pleased” she felt when her parents moved to New Jersey, especially for its proximity to New York. “Just going into the city opened my eyes up,” she said. Her father, Matthew G. Carter, was a prominent civil rights leader who later became the town’s first Black mayor. Meanwhile, her mother encouraged her creativity from an early age, gifting her stationery in a spectrum of vibrant colors, for example. “I didn’t write a note,” Carter joked. “I was collaging with the paper and giving it to friends…These were geometric abstractions. They loved it.”

Carter’s family often spent the summers in Sag Harbor, New York. In the summer of 1977, while pursuing her MFA at Pratt, Carter took a job at the Guild Hall museum in East Hampton. There, she met the painter Al Loving at an opening: “This tall, handsome Black man, and we saw each other and just gravitated immediately,” she recalled. Loving, known for his amorphous, color-clashing wall works, would become a mentor, influencing how Carter approached her work and introducing her to artists like Jack Whitten and Ed Clark.

Through Loving, Carter met legendary dealer George N’Namdi in Detroit, who gave her a solo show in 1984. By her late twenties, she had shown with some of the most prominent Black abstract expressionists, including Whitten, Clark, and Howardena Pindell. She explained, “I like to say: ‘I come from the school of Loving.’”

Carter first encountered Mylar, which would define her material practice, unexpectedly at a Frank Lloyd Wright show at the Cooper Hewitt in 1983. “I didn’t know what that was,” she recalled. Curious, she immediately bought a sheet, cut it down, and began experimenting. “It was just a wonderful, smooth sensation drawing on it.”

That first sheet led to decades of engagement. Carter now sources Mylar in massive rolls—“53 inches by 100 yards,” she told me—and relishes its versatility. “It’s just magical stuff,” she said. The tough, stiff material made it possible to create her complex, colorful, collage-like abstractions with immediacy. They aren’t “collages,” according to her. “I am not collaging. I’m building architecture on the ladder,” she said.

One of Carter’s most powerful bodies of work, “Afro Sentinels,” began in the political climate of the late 2000s, when she witnessed vocal criticism of President Barack Obama and feared for his life. “I thought, ‘sentinels.’ We need something to protect Black people from this kind of nonsense.”

Initially, the works were conceived as individual guardians, but over time, they expanded into army-like forms. On view at the Wexner, Afro Sentinels #3 (2024) presents 14 Mylar-based, 8-foot-tall abstractions resembling weapons hung across the wall. Her references included power figures from the Congo, studded with nails to ward off disease and safeguard communities, and the Terracotta Army guarding the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China. Originally, the “Afro Sentinels” were exclusively wall works, but today, these pieces are accompanied by a new series by the same name, featuring freestanding steel sculptures intended as guardians.

For fifty years, Carter has proven that abstraction can be politically urgent and deeply human. With her new three-dimensional “Afro Sentinels,” she transforms her iconic forms into enduring monuments of resilience. As social and political pressures that first inspired this work intensify, Carter emphasized, “I want that presence now—that physicality.”