NANSI T. LENT | A Thread of Longing - works from 1974 - 2026

"Nansi T. Lent | A Thread of Longing - Works from 1974 - 2026" opens with a reception Saturday, October 10, 6:00 - 8:00 PM, and runs through Sunday, November 8, 2026, at BAU Gallery, 506 Main Street, Beacon, New York. About BAU Gallery presents A Thread of Longing , a solo exhibition of approximately twenty works by Nansi T. Lent spanning more than fifty years of practice. The exhibition traces a single emotional thread across five decades: from early figurative and narrative works rooted in family, memory, and world events, to recent abstractions exploring prayer, self-talk, and the search for connection. As Lent's visual language has evolved, figures have gradually given way to tally marks, repeated gestures, glyphs, and asemic — unreadable — writing, a language that first appears in her 1981 work Gypsy . Across this shift, longing becomes less a subject depicted than a force enacted through repetition: an attempt to speak beyond words and give visible form to inner experience. At the heart of the exhibition is an installation centered on the gallery window. Anchored by Mary Janes (1980), it brings together Prayers — roughly 100 small works made in 2026, each stamped on the back with Lent's meditation mantra — alongside books, artifacts, and newspaper pages that reflect the personal and public events that have made prayer feel necessary. Part archive, part library, part contemporary altar, the installation situates prayer not apart from daily pressures but within them, as an act of attention, resistance, and hope. Seen across fifty years, Lent's work reveals a quiet continuity: what begins as an effort to portray emotional experience becomes a contemplative, abstract practice. A Thread of Longing asks not whether longing can be resolved, but what it reveals — and what new forms it may yet take. ABOUT THE ARTIST Nansi T. Lent is a painter based in Rhinebeck, New York, who has exhibited extensively throughout the Hudson Valley and beyond. Her work has been shown at institutions including the Katonah Museum of Art (Katonah, NY), the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum (Woodstock, NY), the Coral Springs Museum of Art (Coral Springs, FL), GoggleWorks Center for the Arts (Reading, PA), the New York Public Library (New York, NY), and the Starr Library (Rhinebeck, NY), as well as numerous private galleries and artist cooperatives. Ms. Lent holds a BA in Studio Art from Boston College and an MA in Visual Arts Administration from New York University. She is an Active Member of the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum and has served on the board of the National Association of Women Artists. In 2018, she founded Womenswork.art, a gallery space in Poughkeepsie, NY, dedicated to showcasing work by women artists. ABOUT BAU Gallery Founded in 2004, the Beacon Artist Union (BAU), located in Beacon, New York, is an artist-run gallery and project space that serves as a platform for artists to experiment, exhibit, and collaborate across disciplines. Read more Toggle Painting Mixed media