Above: Nancy Josephson, a self-taught creator, says she works on the “outskirts of outsider art.”
By Ken Mammarella
Artist Nancy Josephson is readying her first post-pandemic Delaware show at the same time that she is readying her move from Delaware, her home since 2002.
The show at Wilmington’s Blue Streak Gallery will feature 20 to 30 pieces, both the sacred busts that she calls “spirit heads” and her secular, beaded animal figures.
“I cannot do just the sacred stuff because it’s too intense,” says Josephson, a voudou priestess since 2013. “I need space.”
The show, which runs May 3 through June 4, is titled “The Temple and the Joy Factory.”
Spirit heads start “from humble beginnings (carved Styrofoam, rebar and insulation) but get active after she puts in eyes,” says Blue Streak owner Ellen Bartholomaus. “Then her very quiet studio starts rumbling with activity as each spirit starts yelling at her to get working on them. Then it’s a loud-ass temple.” The “joy” comes from the “sweet animals” that sell well to art-lovers.
Josephson, a self-taught creator working “on the outskirts of outsider art,” and her husband, noted musician David Bromberg, were lured to Wilmington by then-Mayor James Baker. The city gave them a vacant Market Street building, which they renovated and worked from. It’s now for sale.
One of Josephson’s “spirit heads” that will be on exhibit at Blue Streak Gallery through June 4.
“We aged out of the space,” she says. Josephson was born in New York in 1955, and Bromberg is a decade older. “We were kind of pioneers in the downtown, on Market Street. It’s really changed a lot. We really benefited from being down there, but we’ve aged out. It feels like it’s a younger world.”
They are renting a Manhattan apartment, near Columbia University. “We’re New Yorkers at heart,” she says. So they go into her 2019 Honda CRV — the 10th vehicle that Josephson has adorned — and head up the Jersey Turnpike to handle “the daunting task” of moving their belongings.
She is donating a decorated bus and other pieces to the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, which she calls “a second home.” She is donating work to the Museum of Beadwork in Portland, Maine. She is gifting materials that she collected, such as elk antlers and shells, to other artists, but she will find rooms for the beads that are prominent in her art.
She was a musician first. “Music took me on the road,” she says on www.nancyjosephsonart.com. “I went ‘off road’ to search for the ‘yard shows’ done by artists who would never think of themselves as Artists.”
Josephson is donating some of her pieces to the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.
She was later influenced by many facets of Haiti, which she first visited in the 1990s.
“My first trip opened up questions about physical home, one’s spiritual ‘home,’ how one ‘gets by,’ what one must risk during the creative process, what IS the creative process,” she says.
Josephson has returned dozens of times to Haiti to study with artists and spiritual mentors. But she cannot visit the war-torn nation now.
“My personal heartbreak is not being able to go back, but the broader heartbreak is what’s happened there,” she says. “[Going back] would be incredibly dangerous not only for me, but the people I’m with. I’m a pretty clear target. I belong, but I just stick out.”
Her predilection for embellishing her surroundings — “from whole rooms to every vehicle I’ve owned” — also includes a finale, her own cremation urn. The front features a reliquary holding one of her wisdom teeth — “I pulled a hissy fit to get it” since the dentist said it was against the law to return it — and the back says: “Does this make my ashes look big?”
She has not yet made an urn for Bromberg.
“We had a whole discussion about what he wants to have done, and he said, ‘Just surprise me.’ Then in further discussion he said something about wanting to be in the middle of a wheel of halvah. So we’re going to see how that works.”
— Nancy Josephson’s “The Temple and the Joy Factory” opens with a reception 5-7 p.m. May 3 and runs through June 4 at Blue Streak Gallery, 1721 Delaware Ave., Wilmington.
