About
I’m a contemporary mixed media artist working across abstract painting, sculpture, and installation. My work explores how experience settles into the body and takes form through material. Through layered surfaces and tactile processes, I’m interested in how meaning emerges over time, through repetition, accumulation, and change.
If you’re seeking to live with original contemporary art that reflects something deeper, something felt as much as seen, you are in the right place.
Hi I’m Nanci Hersh
Influences and Inspiration.
Water has always been a part of my work. As a child, I spent summer days at the beach, moving between waves and shoreline, searching for what was hidden just beneath the surface. Years later, living and surfing in Hawai‘i deepened that connection. Now, inspiration often comes closer to home, in the shifting seasons of our backyard koi pond or along nearby creeks and rivers.
I was also shaped by my family’s millinery shop, where I was surrounded by the vibrant world of women’s hats. There was a kind of transformation that happened there. Texture, structure, color, and gesture came together in ways that felt both intimate and expressive. That early experience continues to influence my layered, tactile approach to materials.
Across my practice, I return to moments of change, rupture, and renewal. I think about memory as something physical, something that can be held, altered, and reformed. My work often moves between what is fragile and what endures, holding space for both.
A Beginning
I grew up in New Jersey and was, by most accounts, a deeply expressive child. I was often told I was “too much”, too emotional, too energetic, too curious. Art became a place where that energy could live and take shape.
I found early grounding in making with my grandmothers. Nana Rose shared her brushes and paints. Nana Ceil taught me to crochet and sew. A strong high school art program led me to attend Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.
I’ve been making art ever since.
Practice and Work
My work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally, including Estonia, Australia, and Japan. Selected venues include the Delaware Contemporary, Park Towne Place in Philadelphia, Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie, Museum of Encaustic Art in Santa Fe, Francis M. Naumann Fine Art in New York, and the Monmouth Museum in New Jersey, where my Zoom Room Series was presented in a solo exhibition.
I’m the recipient of three Purchase Awards from the Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts and three Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grants. My work is held in public and corporate collections including the Museum of Encaustic Art, Johnson and Johnson, Leland Portland Cement, and OSI Pharmaceuticals. My piece One was recently acquired for the Morgan Research Center (CHOP) at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
In addition to my studio practice, I work as an artist, educator, and curator. I’ve led commissioned and community based art projects including murals, books, and collaborative works with teen mothers, incarcerated youth, and other groups, and have curated exhibitions including Chapel of Tears and The Art of Survival.
With author Ellen McVicker, I illustrated and co created the children’s book Butterfly Kisses and Wishes on Wings, a resource supporting families navigating illness. The book has reached readers around the world and continues to serve as a source of comfort and connection.
