Bea Nettles

From her hand-colored, machine-stitched photographic prints to her artist’s books and well-known Mountain Dream Tarot card deck, the first-known photographic treatment of the tarot, Bea Nettles’s work has always upended tradition. Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory presents the span of her art across half a century, in conjunction with an exhibition co-organized by the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, and the Sheldon Art Galleries in St. Louis, Missouri.

Recognized for her innovations in mixed-media photography, Nettles used alternative photographic processes that produced textured works with subjects including self-portraits; investigations of the body and its relationship to nature and landscape; and the experience of mothering, loss, and aging. A tremendously productive artist, Nettle’s work has received critical acclaim, and been acquired into the permanent collections of museums coast to coast. Now, for the first time in her fifty-year career, Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory offers a large-scale retrospective, tracing the journey of an artist who profoundly illuminates our inner worlds.