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The exhibition The Students: A Study of Color and Light by Donovan Nelson is the inaugural event in series of exhibitions designed in collaboration with the Valentine Museum of Art. Completed in 2000, over a period of 5 days, the portraits in this collection were created from life at the very beginning of Donovan Nelson’s teaching career.  The subjects are Nelson’s former students, and the setting is a high school classroom in the East New York section of Brooklyn, New York.  

Donovan Nelson was born in 1969 in Kingston, Jamaica.  In 1994, he received a B.F.A. in illustration from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Nelson also studied portraiture and figure painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts.  In 1996, he received a M.F.A. in painting from the New York Academy of Art.  Nelson has devoted the majority of his practice to rendering the likeness, personality, and the real or perceived status of the person through portraiture.  Among his notable commissions are Reverend Floyd Flake, Edison O. Jackson, the former president of MEC, and Brooklyn’s first black state Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Williams.

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