Dana Baldwin Naumann

Dana Baldwin Naumann is a Connecticut based sculptor and painter whose work transforms the physical weight of metal into forms of unexpected tenderness. Working primarily with hammered sheets of lead, often finished with copper or zinc patinas, Naumann creates figures and faces that feel at once ancient and immediate. Marked by texture, gesture, and emotional presence, his work explores memory, spirituality, compassion, and the experiences that connect one human life to another.

Naumann’s path to becoming a full time artist emerged from a profound redirection of his own life. Before entering the studio, he built a successful career in corporate sales and marketing, beginning with IBM and later holding leadership positions with Wang, Mitsubishi International, and Westinghouse Corporation.

On August 5, 1993, while commuting to his corporate office during a blackout in New York, Naumann became ill and began falling toward the subway tracks. He remembers being pulled to safety by an unknown man who disappeared before Naumann could thank him. He came to understand the experience as a spiritual awakening and a call to reconsider the life he was living. By 1994, he had left the corporate world to devote himself fully to art, a decision he has never regretted.

Naumann opened his studio at Branford Craft Village in 1995. There, surrounded by books, music, and works in progress, he developed the deeply physical process that would define his sculptural practice. He hammers, molds, cuts, and joins sheets of lead, copper, and steel, allowing the resistance of the material to become part of the work. Copper and zinc patinas bring warmth and tonal variation to the surfaces, softening the visual character of a material more often associated with density and permanence.

Although largely self taught, Naumann’s work is guided by an instinctive understanding of emotion and form. Songs, books, personal experiences, and the lives of others often become the beginnings of new work. Empathy is central to his process. Rather than observing his subjects from a distance, he attempts to enter their emotional world and give physical form to experiences that may be difficult to express in words.

Religious, mythological, and archetypal imagery appears throughout his practice, alongside recurring explorations of family, romantic love, femininity, suffering, social responsibility, and the search for connection. Elongated faces, hollow eyes, protective gestures, and closely joined figures carry emotions that move between solitude and companionship, sorrow and hope, vulnerability and strength. His sculptures can appear monumental despite their intimate scale, holding what art critic Steve Starger described as “a sense of mystery and longing.”

At the center of Naumann’s practice is Never Forget . . . Never Again, a deeply personal body of seventeen hammered lead sculptures, each accompanied by a narrative poem. The series was created through Naumann’s lifelong friendship with Sigmund Strochlitz, a survivor of Auschwitz and an influential advocate for Holocaust remembrance. Strochlitz’s experiences brought Naumann closer to a history that was not his own but affected him profoundly.

Through sculpture and poetry, Naumann responded to stories of deportation, imprisonment, separation, survival, and unimaginable loss. The weight of lead became inseparable from the weight of memory. Presented as eight pedestal sculptures and nine wall works, the series asks the viewer not only to witness the past, but to consider the individual lives held within it.

Never Forget . . . Never Again was exhibited at Artworks Gallery in Hartford in 1999, at Gallery RIVAA in New York City in 2009, and at the New Haven Free Public Library in 2011. In 1997, a separate four foot Holocaust memorial sculpture by Naumann was dedicated at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut.

Naumann’s broader exhibition history includes presentations at Art Expo New York, Galerie Michele in Washington, DC, York Square Cinema Gallery in New Haven, the Jewish Community Center in Connecticut, Umbrella Arts in New York City, Six Summit Gallery in Westbrook, and galleries in Rhode Island, California, and Hawaii. His first public exhibition devoted to painting, Inner Feelings/Inner Thoughts, was presented at the New Haven Free Public Library in 2009, revealing a parallel practice in which faces, landscapes, and internal states move through a more fluid visual language.

His sculptures have also been created for or placed with institutions including the United States Special Olympics, Villanova University, Aetna, the University of Connecticut, East Shore Adult Day Center, and AIDS Project New Haven. In 2024, Naumann served as the juror for The Crossing at Hygienic Art in New London, extending his role within the regional arts community beyond his own studio practice.

Today, Naumann continues to work in North Branford, Connecticut, where Naumann Gallery occupies the former Saint Augustine Chapel. As both artist and gallery owner, he has created a space in which his own life in art exists alongside his commitment to presenting the work of others.

Across more than three decades, Naumann has remained devoted to art as a deeply human act. His sculptures do not turn away from suffering, but neither are they without tenderness, humor, love, or hope. In his hands, lead becomes more than material. It becomes a bearer of memory, a vessel for emotion, and a way of recognizing one life within another.