Peter Nadin is a key figure in the downtown New York art scene in the late 1970s and 1980s. A painter, sculptor, and poet whose work explores the practice of mark- and image-making as fundamental, evolutionary human functions, Nadin is the son of a sea captain whose family roots stretch back centuries in northwest England. He arrived in New York in 1976 on a Max Beckmann award from the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and he became involved in a burgeoning downtown art scene that included Christopher D’Arcangelo, Daniel Buren, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, Jenny Holzer, and Lawrence Weiner. In 1978, along with D’Arcangelo, he founded the artist-run space 84 West Broadway in his own Tribeca loft. Two years later, he became a founder of an unlikely artists’ collective called The Offices of Fend, Fitzgibbon, Holzer, Nadin, Prince & Winters, whose members (including Richard Prince and Jenny Holzer) offered up their talents as critical thinkers to solve real-world problems for clients. In the early 1990s, Nadin left the commercial art world, yet he continued to paint on a farm in an isolated part of the Catskill Mountains while working closely with the land.