Nadine Terk

Nadine Terk is an artist, art historian and educator. Her aesthetic practices have eastern roots that are informed by her tenure in Japan during which she studied the Japanese tea ceremony, ikebana and ceramics, and her subsequent research on Japanese art of the Momoyama period (1574-1615) conducted while completing an MA in Japanese art history at Columbia University, NY.  Terk taught courses in art history and served as curator for the Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art before beginning her studio practice. Her initial studies were at the Art Students' League in New York City and at Studio Incamminati in Philadelphia where she studied classical drawing and portraiture with the late Nelson Shanks. 

Terk has since engaged in a variety of projects that encourage the rethinking of social constructs. Beyond Clean (2010-2011), a multi-media collaboration, explores object value relationships and the ritualization of cleaning as a contemporary answer to the Japanese tea ceremony. There For You (2011-2014) http://there4uproject.com is a series of portraits of breast cancer survivors and their audio stories recorded in her studio during the portrait sessions that push the boundaries of intimacy between sitter and artist during the portrait painting process. As Artist-In-Residence of White Oak Conservation Center (2012-2013), she completed a series of portraits of some of the world's most endangered animals that explore speciesism in the field of conservation. http://endangeredspeciesartist.com.

Terk completed a body of abstract paintings inspired by an artist residency with the Amelia Island Chamber Music Festival (2013-14). These images are based upon the physics of light and sound waves. In 2016, Terk received the prestigious Jerome Foundation Fellowship during which she began creating an extensive body of hand-built figures that were fired under the direction of famed potter, Richard Bresnahan, in the largest wood-burning kiln in the Americas.