Nancy Lawton

Lawton, Nancy ALBANY Noted artist Nancy Lawton died at St. Peter's Hospice in Albany, N.Y. on Saturday evening, May 5, 2007, after a courageous five-year battle with cancer. She was born in California and moved to Albany in 1998. She was 57 years old. Reflect-ing on her childhood in suburban Santa Clara, California in the mid-1950s, Nancy Lawton remarked that her chosen path might have been, in fact, predestined. In her immediate neighborhood, in a subdivision surrounded by cherry and plum orchards, all seven children living in four contiguous households grew up to become artists. Lawton studied art at California State University at San Jose, and received her M.F.A. at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston in 1980. Her drawings received an important imprimatur in 1982 when she was introduced to Gene Baro, the influential curator of prints and drawings at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York. The next year, Baro organized a solo retrospective exhibition of Lawton's graphite drawings at the Museum, and purchased eight works for the Museum's permanent collection. Lawton's drawings are part of the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and the Albany Institute of History and Art. Her drawings are regularly included in exhibitions at the Arkansas Art Center; the Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, N.Y.; the Hunt Institute for Botanical Representation at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh; and the National Academy of Design, New York. She has been represented by Hirschl & Adler Modern, 21 East 70th Street, New York, New York, since 2001. Ms. Lawton is survived by her husband, Dr. Richard Enemark, Headmaster of the Doane Stuart School in Albany, and two children, Faith and Forrest. She is survived, also, by her father, Edward Lawton, of Santa Clara, California, and her sister, Carol Lawton, of Fremont, California. A memorial service will be held at a future date. The family requests that donations in Nancy's memory be made to the American Cancer Society or the Campaign for the Doane Stuart School, in lieu of flowers.