Woodrow Nash doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about.
On a warm October morning, the artist took a short break from his work to give a tour of his sprawling South Akron studio. As we walked, the conversation shifted to the Sojourner Truth statue. His life-size bronze sculpture of the famous abolitionist was unveiled in 2024.
The project was years in the making and faced several challenges, including in Nash’s personal life. While working on the statue, Nash had a stroke that affected his left hand, his dominant side. He went through physical therapy and had to learn to create art with his right hand.
The statue is also Nash’s first public sculpture in a career that spans decades.
“I never pursued public sculptures,” Nash, 78, said. “I would not have pursued that one. But they came to me because I was an Akron-based sculptor, and this is an Akron project, so they offered it to me.”
What does it mean, I asked him, for your first public sculpture to be in your hometown? He paused for a minute, considering his response.
“People were excited about it, but I’m too close to it,” Nash said, dismissing the hubbub. “I mean, this is what I do.”
This response would have surprised me earlier, but after more than an hour in Nash’s company, I’d come to learn that he is completely uninterested in the pomp and circumstance of the art world. He’s too focused on the work.
Still, I pushed him for more.
“You say that, but you are one of the most well-known artists currently working in and to come out of Akron,” I said.
“Yeah,” he replied, chuckling slightly.
Nash’s art is featured in Beyoncé’s 2020 film, “Black Is King” and owned by musician Lenny Kravitz. I learned the latter fact from Angela King of Angela King Gallery in New Orleans. She began showing Nash’s work in 2014.
“He just moves through the world as his whole self and he doesn’t really depend on other people,” King said. “He knows how good he is, but he’s not flashy. He’s not arrogant.”
On the topic of fame, Nash recounted a recent conversation with Wanda Nash, his wife of 42 years. In September, he attended Chicago’s African Festival of the Arts. It was his first time selling at a festival since his stroke in 2022. He sold out in two days. Afterward, he received texts from people who were sad to have missed him — and the chance to purchase one of his pieces.
“I was just telling Wanda,” he said, “‘I think I’m more famous than I realize.’”
‘It was like jumping in the deep end of the pool’
Nash lived several artistic lives before settling into clay.
After graduating from John R. Buchtel High School, he attended the University of Akron to study art. After three years, armed with his portfolio, his “ego” took him to New York.
“It was a situation where I thought that I knew as much as the teachers,” Nash said of his decision to leave Akron. In New York, he attended the Albert Pels Art School and graduated in 1977 with an associate’s degree in commercial art. Afterward, he worked as a fashion illustrator and designed album covers for jazz labels.
Nash spent 15 years in New York. It was a period that was fruitful yet frustrating.
“I found in New York at that time that as a Black man, I was only as good as my last assignment,” he said. “I never felt that I earned my position. I was always trying to prove myself, and that was the frustration.”
After a stint back in Akron working as an illustrator at Goodyear and American Greetings, Nash moved to Madison, Wisconsin, in 1991. One day, while out with Wanda, the two stumbled upon Art Fair on the Square, a long-running outdoor festival that takes place in front of the state capitol building. It was the first time Nash saw artists selling their wares in a festival environment.
“People were coming up, pulling out their credit cards, purchasing art. I looked at my wife and I said, ‘I can do this.’ That was like a defining moment,” he said. “And after that, I went back and rented out a little studio, bought a little kiln.”
At the time, Nash felt that the art world was overcrowded with painters and other two-dimensional artists. He wanted to find a niche that wasn’t overrun. So he decided to work with clay.
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said. “It was like jumping in the deep end of the pool. I didn’t know how to swim, but I just jumped in.”
Nash’s style pulls inspiration from different continents, time periods
Nash started out making and selling vases, bowls and other types of utilitarian pottery at weekend art fairs. That endeavor became successful enough that he was able to quit his full-time job and focus solely on his art. Sometime in the late ‘90s or early aughts, he moved back to Akron.
It was during this period that Nash’s work began to evolve, from practical everyday pieces of pottery to more ornate works. He drew inspiration from history, both national and international, but all of it steeped in Black history.
He discovered the work of an enslaved man in South Carolina who created jugs for wine and liquor that he adorned with faces. He studied the history of Nigerian artists in the 15th century who created ceremonial vessels featuring the likenesses of their spiritual and tribal leaders.
Eventually, Nash came up with a name for his new art style: African Nouveau.
“My heritage [was] steeped in African tradition, but my schooling and high concepts of beauty and everything like that was from the European school,” he said. “So I thought I would combine what they were doing in Africa with the naïve type of art, with the Shona stone and the primitive-looking woodcuts, with what they did during the [19th] century with Art Nouveau.”
Nash has spent his career evolving his artistic style of African Nouveau. Over the years, his work has gotten more contemporary, King said. The fashions and designs of his sculptures have changed. He’s painted some in stark black and white glazes.
Back in Nash’s studio, sculptures in various stages of completion cover much of the space. In the front room, he glazed a sculpture of a regal woman with intricate braided hair. Like many of Nash’s pieces, the eye sockets are empty, but no less expressive.
“There is a unique quality to Woodrow’s sculpture that I’ve never seen or felt,” the gallerist King said. “It’s really an emotional connection when you stand and look at one of his sculptures. I’ve shown a dozen different sculptors, and I’ve never really seen people quite as taken as when they stand and look at his. … The eyes have a lot to do with it.”
‘He’s still doing it. He still enjoys it’
Learning how to craft the eyes was one of the toughest parts of Jeff Willis’ job. Willis is one of Nash’s two assistants. He started working for Nash eight years ago.
The bodies of the sculptures are created using molds. After that, Willis adds the arms, the facial features and the detailed hair designs. The pieces are fired in a gas kiln, transforming from clay into solid ceramic. Then, the pieces go to Nash for glazing.
“The eyes would be dead when I did them,” Willis said with a laugh. “So I had to watch him. I kept watching him and seeing what he did, what was consistent about that. How did he do the eyes that gives them so much life and intrigue?”
Willis is a longtime artist himself, but working with Nash taught him how to be a different kind of artist — from spending hours in the studio to working with gallery owners to establishing a client base.
“When I first started working with him, one of the things I noticed is that he worked every day,” Willis said. “I learned what it takes to be a serious artist, to have and develop a career. And that he’s still doing it. He still enjoys it. That’s given me a perspective that I didn’t have before.”
Nash not interested in resting on his past work
Nash has slowed down in recent years. He’s still in the studio every day but only works half days on the weekend. He’s gone from 12-hour days to 7.5-hour days. Much of that was due to his stroke. He joked that it now takes him twice as long to do half as much. After learning to use his right hand after the stroke, he’s now retraining his left hand. When I visited him in the studio, he rotated between the two.
As I wrapped up my visit, I once again broached the topic of artistic legacy. Earlier, when I asked Nash what keeps him coming into the studio, he said something along the lines of, “Well, what else would I do?”
With a paintbrush in hand and his focus returned to his work instead of my incessant (according to me) questions, Nash considered my query.
“When I think about creativity, especially in the music world, I look at, when I was growing up, there was the Temptations and the Four Tops,” he said. “At a certain point in their career, they kind of leaned back and relied on their old stuff that they had become famous for.”
He continued, “I think about that because I don’t want to rest like that. I want to continue on creating. I don’t want to be remembered for what I did. I want to be remembered for what I’m doing.”
