Past Exhibition

“Nature’s Art”
Photographs by Nancy Astor-White

Art Show May 11 - June 15, 2023

The Sherman Library is pleased to present a new exhibition “Nature’s Art” – photographs by Nancy Astor-White, PhD.  Nature’s paintings are all around us. It is just up to us to see them.  With her camera, Nancy Astor-White has developed a keen eye for looking and capturing nature’s beauty. 

“As we go along breaking the speed limit, staring at a cell phone, hurrying to an errand, most of us, most of the time, fail to notice the special part that our surroundings play in our lives that affects our mood, aids or interferes with our attitudes, or gives us a laugh.  You don’t have to be an artist to take in what the natural world has to offer and benefit from it. It just means that you should teach yourself to LOOK.” Says photographer Astor-White.

Her love of photography began with the gift of a Kodak “Baby Brownie” camera sometime in the 1940’s, and the habit of “look” has been with her ever since.  Her mother was a painter so art lessons were part of the mix, including lots of time spent at New York galleries and museums.  After graduating from Cornell University with Honors in philosophy, she moved to New York City and worked at CBS both in documentary films and still life photography.  Some of her memorable assignments were the construction of Lincoln Center, the building of the Eero Saarinen TWA Building at JFK airport, installation of Picasso’s Guernica at the Museum Of Modern Art, and taking aerial photographs from the open door of a small plane and the Goodyear Blimp. Her photographs have been published in The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune, Life Magazine, Diners Club Magazine, a section devoted to Pop Artists in The Art Collectors’ Almanac, and representation in the Art Museum of  Rochester, and The Museum Of Modern Art in New York.  

In the late 1960’s, Astor-White became a Licensed Clinical Psychologist after receiving her PhD in psychology at Columbia University.  She was also a Research Associate at the Center For Policy Research at Columbia and had a successful private practice in Psychology in New York. 

In 1980 she and her husband Thomas White moved to Sherman and started raising Arabian horses at their Glen Brook Farm.  She has served on the Conservation Commission and several other town commissions.   Through all of these transitions, she never stopped taking photographs many of which are in the Sherman Library Show.

We invite you to meet the artist at the opening reception on Friday, May 12, 2023, 6 – 8pm. The show will be on display at the Sherman Library through June 15th.