Painter Laurie Nye brings her vibrant, nature-inspired work to UNM as the 2026 Frederick Hammersley Visiting Artist Fellow. Free, public events include an artist talk February 19 and an open studio on April 2.
Laurie Nye’s colorful paintings of natural scenes, trees, flowers and plants explore and present the possibilities of utopia, and embody feelings of expression and freedom.
Nye, who is based in California and Tennessee, has been awarded the 2026 Frederick Hammersley Visiting Artist Fellowship at the University of New Mexico Department of Art.
Nye is interested in connection to nature and the celebration of nature. She approaches the world as a living being, a mother earth, and through her painting, she is dedicated to ideas of strengthening our relationship to nature, and the intimate bond we can find with our individual immediate surroundings. She is invested in looking, sensing, feeling and seeing through the creation of the work. The elements of color, line, and shape are paramount to her practice. Her curvy lyrical positive and negative shapes, full, emphatic and soft materiality, varied brushwork, vivid and pastel color, and sophisticated use of line presents a picture plane that melds flatness with painterly shifts and gossamer space…