Nancy Reid Carr

“I am driven by the belief that I can achieve anything if I work hard enough: an ideology I learned from my mother, wish to teach my daughters, and hope to manifest in my work”

My name is Nancy Reid Carr, and I am a photographer and a jeweler. 

It took me a while to realize that this was the path I wanted to take in life. My family was not very creative, and I was pushed to enroll in business and law classes instead of art and music electives throughout high school. Still, my mother was an unknowing role model. She was a very motivated woman who started out as a secretary in a finance company and worked all the way up to becoming a partner. Despite sometimes asking me, When are you going to get a real job?, she was an example of the type of strong, passionate woman I wanted to become. 

I attended Roger Williams University to get a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in creative writing. To fulfill my visual arts requirement, I took a photography class with Denny Moers, a prominent professor and photographer. This class became the first pivotal experience for my art career. Denny recognized my talent, helped to incite my excitement for photography, and remains an inspiring and motivating influence that I keep in touch with to this day. 

I joined more photography classes, completed an independent study with Denny, and, much to the chagrin of my parents, promptly dropped out of college. Denny helped me discover what I wanted to do, and then I realized that Roger Williams was not the place for me to do it. 

I soon realized that New England was not the place for me, either. So, one day, I got in my car and left. I ventured down to Charleston, South Carolina to visit with a friend for a month, and, rather than returning home, I headed westward and landed in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This was the second pivotal experience for my art career; it changed everything. I apprenticed under photographers Meridel Rubinstein and David Michael Kennedy, and did my first big printing job for a man named Robert Stivers. These photographers opened my eyes to the artistic possibilities of being a photographer. They existed as my continuous proof that I could have a career doing what I loved—eventually. 

During my five years in Santa Fe, I did little shows and hung my pieces in the coffee shops and bars where I worked side jobs. Then, I moved back to Providence, married, had two lovely daughters, and finished my degree in photography at University of Rhode Island (URI). At URI, I met another hugely influential professor, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, who grounded my flailing imagination and focused my creativity into a cohesive body of professional work. 

After receiving my degree, I tried everything from baby photography to equestrian photography. However, I had children of my own, and by the time I started shooting again, art had gone digital and I had discovered metal printing. Printing my photographic work on metal sheets gave the images a gleam that paper printing never could. Prints of images I captured on early morning walks along beaches and at botanical gardens were accepted into a couple of shows, and I even started exploring some figurative work. Then, in 2010, the store that I had been working at closed. I suddenly had the perfect opportunity to dive back into my artwork. I participated in the Providence Art Festival, and my small booth of prints achieved a surprising amount of success on the very first day. “This might actually be doable,” I thought.

I started participating in more and more shows, and soon discovered jewelry. I began printing my photography onto bracelet cuffs, and when I experimented with people’s commissions and personal requests, I branched out into other jewelry and ornaments. I even bought machines for my small in-house studio so that I could make my smaller creations at home. In addition to incorporating my own photography into jewelry and ornaments, I now also work with museums like the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; I license their artwork to print on my jewelry and sell in their gift shops. 

I have worked tremendously hard to get where I am today, and on the surprisingly rare occasion in which I am questioned on the validity of my art career, I lean on my success and the support of other artist friends who I have met at shows and on the road. They understand because they live my same lifestyle and inspire me to keep working in a very difficult field. 

Perhaps this is why—though I find the architecture of cityscapes very interesting—I ultimately fall back to natural imagery. Nature contains an innate stillness and serenity that transcends the chaos of our everyday lives, and being able to wear something that captures this essence on your own body helps spread peace in a world that has enough negativity. I do still create some figurative work—which I explored extensively when I was younger—focusing on the external communication of intimate femininity and the imbalances that come with being a woman. Figurative photography is ultimately less about the portrait and more about the feeling it conveys, which in some ways makes it more similar to nature than one might think.

Right now, the art world seems like one of the few places where there are no lines between male and female. Perhaps I was lucky, but I am driven by the belief that I can achieve anything if I work hard enough—an ideology that I learned from my mother, wish to teach my daughters, and hope to manifest in my work in the spirit of a more peaceful, serene future for all. 

Thank you,

Nancy