Nanette Carter’s “Afro Sentinels III” is part of her “A Question of Balance” exhibition at The Montclair Art Museum.
On the back wall of the special exhibition gallery at the Montclair Art Museum, Nanette Carter has convened the ancestor spirits. Fourteen of them, to be exact — walking-stick thin and mostly upright, tall as a man and busily watching. They stand in a row and are evenly spaced: Each is unique, but none is more important than any other.
This is a democratic tribunal that Carter has summoned. There is no boss, but there is a singleness of purpose shared by the figures. Though their posture isn’t aggressive, it is hard not to notice that many of them have spikes and blunt club-like structures attached to their narrow forms. Tangle with these guardians at your own peril.
Nanette Carter’s “Cantilevered #28 (Teetering).”
Of course, if you don’t have much of a poetic turn or a gift for seeing ghosts, you might say that “Afro Sentinels III” is nothing more than a few jagged strips of painted plastic fixed to a white wall. Yet for most visitors to the MAM, I’ll bet the “Sentinels” will produce that fierce quiver in the unconscious that comes from a close encounter with history. Most will not doubt they are standing in the presence of champions.
Such is the illusory power generated by “Nanette Carter: A Question of Balance,” a focused, coherent, 43-piece retrospective that surveys more than three decades of work. No matter when Carter made a piece, it always feels like a prayer.
From the beginning of her public life, Carter, who grew up in Montclair, has been beset by justified anxiety. Her determination to remain resilient is reflected in her favorite material. Mylar, a thin plastic sheeting, appears flimsy, but it is actually quite sturdy. It can conform to the shape and even the hue of the walls, but once painted, it sings as loudly as any canvas can.
Carter’s tinted plastic assemblies are always more modular than their seamless-looking surfaces suggest they are. The artist is free to jigsaw her Mylar pieces together in any configuration that she likes. Though the artwork she makes is two-dimensional, and it’s fair to call it collage, there is also a sculptural element in the way in which she stacks, support and counterweights her winsome blocks of color.
To underscore the insecurity she is determined to express, Carter hangs very specific handles on abstract pieces. One series is called “Destabilizing”; another is “Slightly Off Keel”; yet another is “Teetering.” Given the severity of her vertigo, it is no wonder she keeps things Mylar-flat. Her pieces hug the wall, but she is still concerned about support: some of the best works in this show are “Cantilevered.”
Nanette Carter’s “Cantilevered #57.”
Among these is the handsome but unnerving “Cantilevered #57,” a play of irregular horizontal shapes, a stone-gray hump, and a pair of black circles. One of these balls is balanced precariously atop the curve, but may be about to roll down the slope. The other has been left behind.
This piece, like many of the others by Carter, is an example of her chromatic wizardry. A russet strip of painted Mylar harmonizes beautifully with its moody blue background and a little crowning strip of mossy green. Every shade and tone seems to speak of the earth in motion. She is an ace at matching and fitting together shapes, too, tipping some of the painted Mylar pieces forward, letting some of the lines slump and sag, fashioning sharp cut-out corners, and creating evocative subdivisions within fields. There are always more acute angles than there initially seem to be, and these contribute to a pleasing, compact tidiness that is general across her art.
Carter is also sensitive to the effects created when plastic is kissed by pigment. Often, she is able to create a swirling, artfully uneven effect that looks a little bit like the surface of a marbled bowling ball and a little like stained glass illuminated from within.
Yet this Mylar-shuffling mastery is always a means to an end. These are stories she is telling with symbol and shape, and they are usually about things sliding toward entropy.
Nanette Carter’s “Destabilizing #9.”
In the chilly but oh-so-effective “Destabilizing #9,” a comb-like sheet of stormy gray sinks its teeth into a tall rectangular shape that stretches toward the sky like an apartment tower. It is shielded from the invasive power of the tines overhead by a staticky light-gray shape that resembles a pair of legs in mid-flight from peril. The border is thick, but there is no telling how deep those needles are going to go.
In “Toppling,” Carter affixes a rusted metal O and a barbed wooden pendulum to a patchwork of Mylar pieces. She has rested the object on a precarious perch: the place where the painted, drawn and oil-sticked lines converge. Time is ticking. Things can go either way. The old forms can hold or they can tumble, and we’ll be left with no record-keeping at all.
All of this sliding, teetering and toppling might make you think that Carter’s personal story has been a difficult one. Papers in a semi-biographical vitrine in the middle of the exhibition gallery suggest otherwise. As curator Mary Birmingham shows us, Carter’s talent was recognized early. She was educated at Oberlin College, she has shown all over the United States, and she has taught art in colleges for decades. Her father Matthew G. Carter, a champion of affordable housing and civil rights, was a respected pastor and Montclair’s first African-American mayor. She has got a whole community behind her and, by all evidence, she always has.
But Montclair thinks of itself as an enlightened place, and enlightenment means looking at things that may be tough to see. Carter’s sense of destabilization isn’t merely about her own life. It is also about the world that she, and we, must inhabit.
Exciting as it is, “A Question of Balance” is a portrait of a woman worried: about injustice and inequality, about the condition of the planet, about the fragility of all living things, and about her own place in society. These early months of 2025 have been a time of great turbulence. The civility, intellectual curiosity and inclusiveness that are hallmarks of towns like Montclair seems to be in short supply in America. If Carter fears we’re going backward — and it’s pretty clear she does — she’s got some hard evidence to back that up.
Nanette Carter’s “Shifting Perspectives #6.”
“A Question of Balance” is the centerpiece of a quietly provocative season of shows at the MAM — ones that take a stand on behalf of the diversity of identity and perspective at a time when that’s not necessarily a popular thing to do.
“Interwoven Power: Native Knowledge/Native Art,” a strong cross-generational exhibition that pairs very old works of Native American art with not-dissimilar ones of recent vintage, makes a powerful case for the persistence of cultural traditions, even in the face of modernization and homogenization.
“Family, Community, and Belonging,” a show that draws from the museum’s deep permanent collection, is candid about American history and the particularities of race, sex and class.
And right in the stairwell is another bold abstract piece by Carter: “Shifting Perspectives,” a reassembled and reimagined version of another monumental work featuring the same colored pieces of Mylar.
Did she fret when she pulled it apart and put it back together? Maybe a little. That seems to be her disposition. But I reckon the Afro Sentinels were watching her all the way.
“Nanette Carter: A Question of Balance” will be at The Montclair Art Museum through July 6. Visit montclairartmuseum.org.
_________________________
CONTRIBUTE TO NJARTS.NET
Since launching in September 2014, NJArts.net, a 501(c)(3) organization, has become one of the most important media outlets for the Garden State arts scene. And it has always offered its content without a subscription fee, or a paywall. Its continued existence depends on support from members of that scene, and the state’s arts lovers. Please consider making a contribution of any amount to NJArts.net via PayPal, or by sending a check made out to NJArts.net to 11 Skytop Terrace, Montclair, NJ 07043.
