Lowell Nesbitt

Lowell Nesbitt was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1933 and studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before establishing himself in New York, where he became associated with the Photorealist movement that emerged alongside Pop Art in the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike Photorealists who focused on urban and industrial subjects, Nesbitt became best known for large-scale, meticulously rendered paintings of flowers — irises, roses, orchids — painted with a hyper-real clarity and often at a monumental, mural-like scale that transformed a traditionally modest subject into ambitious contemporary painting. In 1976, NASA commissioned Nesbitt as part of its Fine Arts Program to document the Apollo space program, granting him behind-the-scenes access to document the Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz missions — a rare honor that placed his meticulous realist technique in service of documenting one of the defining technological achievements of the era. This body of space-themed work exists alongside his more familiar botanical subjects and is held by institutions including the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. Nesbitt was also a prolific printmaker, producing limited-edition serigraphs of his botanical subjects that brought his instantly recognizable large-scale flower paintings to a broader collector market at more accessible price points. He died in New York in 1993, and his paintings and prints remain popular with collectors of American Photorealism and botanical art.