Detroit Private Art

Jim Nawara earned a BFA degree from the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA degree in painting at the University of Illinois, Champaign. Nawara is a Professor Emeritus of Painting & Drawing in the James Pearson Duffy Department of Art and Art History at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he taught for forty-six years.

Nawara has exhibited his paintings, prints and drawings widely in more than 250 international, national and regional group exhibitions, and ten solo exhibitions. His work has been purchased for numerous museum, corporate, university and private collections. These include: The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Detroit Institute of Arts, Butler Institute of American Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, National Endowment for the arts, National Museum of Warsaw, Poland, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, University of Western Ontario, California State University, Georgia State University, IBM Corporation, Dow Automotive Systems, Ameritech Corporation, Kresge Foundation, Polk Corporation, and Ford Motor Company.

Nawara’s work emanates from a continuum of ideas and observations about landscape that have intrigued him since he was a child. Nawara has said, “I am interested in natural and unnatural visual events in landscape. These events may be grand, unimportant, profound or quirky. While my images evolve from actual places, ultimately the work is about composition, interpretation, invention, and memory, as well as the physical process of painting. I consider subject matter a vehicle to express something that is ineffable, yet guided by acute observation, history, and by the inspirational works of a wide variety of fine artists, past and present.”