Nancyjo Ward

Nancy Jo Ward creates portraits of fictitious women — figures assembled from imagination, cultural fragments, and layered process rather than any singular face or life. These are not studies of real subjects; they are constructed presences, invented to hold emotional weight and invite an inner dialog with the viewer’s own experience of memory, loss, resilience, and self.

The work begins in digital applications and moves outward into the physical: drawing, painting, collage, and printing onto archival papers, aluminum, and crystalline-coated polymer. Acrylics, oils, pastels, and metallic foils accumulate until each surface holds the kind of density that rewards slow, close looking. The digital and the analog are not in tension here — they are the same gesture, carried across different materials. Process and surface together become the argument.

Ward’s fictitious women occupy a space between the universal and the particular, open enough for viewers to bring their own interior narratives while maintaining a distinct psychological presence. Like the fictitious portraits examined in nineteenth-century literary tradition — from Poe to Wilde — her figures carry something the visible surface alone cannot contain. The portrait becomes a s...

2018 MA Fine Art Digital with Distinction - University of Arts London, Camberwell College
1980 BFA Illustration & Painting with Honors - School of Visual Arts
1978 Fine Arts Foundation Program - Cleveland Institute of Art

2026 “LA to UK Alumni Showcase” University of Arts London & Royal College of Art, Los Angeles, CA USA
2026 “Altered Realities”, Westmont Ridley-Tree Art Museum, Montecito, CA USA
2025 “The Sublime Essence of Lightness and Darkness”, XV Florence Biennale, Florence, IT
2025 “Digital Salon” Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Los Angeles, CA USA
2025 “24th International Art Exchange, Metropolitan Museum of Art”, Tokyo, JP
2025 “On The Edge”, Westmont Ridley-Tree Art Museum, Montecito, CA USA
2025 “Gestalt 2025”, bG Gallery, Santa Monica, CA USA
2024 “23rd International Art Exchange, Metropolitan Museum of Art”, Tokyo, JP
2024 “Gestalt 2024”, bG Gallery, Santa Monica, CA USA
2024 “Firenze Contemporary II”, Art Art Armando Xhomo Gallery, Firenze, IT
2024 “13th Concorso d’Arte Donne in Rinascita” Milan, IT
2023 “Pixels, Portals & Paradigms” Group Exhibition, Allan Hancock College, Santa Maria CA USA
2022 “Spirit of Peace” Juried Exhibition, Root Kayaköy, Istanbul, TR
2022 “Visceral” Juried Media Art Exhibition, MADS Gallery, Milan, IT
2021 “Ceremonial” Juried Exhibition, Los Angeles Art Association, Los Angeles, CA USA
2021 “Women Artists Making Their Mark” Juried Exhibition, O’Hanlon Art Center, Mill Valley, CA USA
2021 “Petite ...