About Woodrow Nash

Woodrow Nash is an Akron sculptor who gave a name to what his hands were already doing. He calls it African Nouveau, the meeting of 15th century Benin art and the slender, flowing line of European Art Nouveau.

Born in Akron in 1948, he grew up on the city’s south side and graduated from Buchtel High School. He studied art for three years at the University of Akron, then went to New York City, where in 1977 he earned an associate degree in commercial art from Pels School of Art.

Before the clay came the line. He painted murals for local institutions, drew fashion in New York, and illustrated record albums for jazz labels. Back home in Ohio, he was a technical illustrator at Goodyear Aerospace Corporation and an illustrator for American Greetings Corporation. In 1991 he moved to Madison, Wisconsin, worked as a graphic designer, and then turned to clay. He began freelancing as a sculptor and opened Creative Ceramics Studio.

He works in stoneware, earthenware, terracotta and porcelain, through electric firing, pit firing and raku, letting the fire finish what his hands begin. In August 2002 he came home and opened his Akron studio and gallery. Today he moves between a production studio on Copley Road and a finishing studio on Sweitzer Avenue.

His work is held in collections around the world and shown at Angela King Gallery in New Orleans and E&S Gallery in Louisville. At Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana, his series The Children of Whitney stands in clay, formerly enslaved people shown as the children they were when freedom came. Summit Artspace named him a 2024 Lifetime Achievement honoree and notes that his work appeared in Beyoncé’s “Black Is King.”

In 2024 Nash completed his first public work, a life-size bronze Sojourner Truth at the center of Akron’s Sojourner Truth Legacy Plaza. The idea was decades old. He made a prototype in the 1990s, and the project came back to life in 2019. Midway through, a stroke took the use of his left side, including his dominant hand. He kept working, and made the sculpting part of his recovery. Cast at Studio Foundry in Cleveland, the statue was unveiled on May 29, 2024, 173 years to the day after Truth stood in Akron and asked, “Ain’t I a Woman?”

She stands in his city now.