71st Annual Juried Exhibition: Nancy E. F. Halbert

I am a kinetic learner.  I was sent to dance classes for most of my childhood.  My next-door neighbor who had two daughters was a graduate in Dance from Ohio State University.  My father had never heard of such a major. When I was a junior in high school, my father had found my neighbor inside her car in her locked garage, dead, an unfortunate suicide leaving her girls and me lost and confused.  She was my first mentor.  I studied dance from her.  I was determined to go to Ohio State University to study dance as she had.  My father still did not understand the point, but let me go in spite of the odds of never landing a job upon graduation.

As it turns out, I did not complete the dance program. I had my first back incident when I fell on stage and ruptured a disc. I needed surgery and when I returned to school, I found myself in the Art Department knowing I could never study anything, but the arts.  I did not think of myself as a drawer or painter, I was a choreographer.  I used line, form, time, and shape to develop a unified composition as tools to create dances.  It was then that I discovered how similar the principles and elements were in creating a painting or a dance, except a dance is gone in a moment, a flash of a camera’s shutter remains with videos only seen by relatives.  A painting can last a very long time, and may be appreciated by a much larger audience.  I ended up staying in the Fine Arts Department creating a major that OSU did not yet have, an Arts Administration Degree.  My father, of course, understood that.