Nancy Christine Neaher Maas was born in New York City, the daughter of the Honorable Edward R Neaher, US District Judge, Eastern District, and Catherine King Neaher, an attorney for the US Social Security Appeals Division. Along with her two sisters and one brother, Maas grew up in Garden City on Long Island. She attended Smith College, graduating in 1963 after which she earned a MAT at Harvard University in 1964. It was then she joined the Peace Corps, faithfully writing home about the country she was stationed in, Bolivia, as well as its people, and her fellow Peace Corp volunteers, idealistic young Americans such as herself at the height of the Cold War yet amidst the hopefulness of the Great Society. By 1976, Maas would go on to earn an MA and a PhD in Art History, specializing in African Art, from Stanford University and begin a long teaching career including appointments at Hunter College, Cornell University, and most extensively, Ithaca College. She has now entered what she refers to as her "third career," that of an artist, specializing watercolors. According to her Web site, www.nmaas.com, Maas "paints in upstate New York, northern Michigan and in the Southwest." In a reflection written almost fifty years later, Maas referred to her years in the Peace Corps as "a signal time in my life." In re-reading her letters home so many years later, she was struck by the fact that "at times I sound like the feminist I later became." Finally, Maas credits her two years in Bolivia with introducing her to non-Western art, an appreciation of which she would base her life's work upon.
From the guide to the Nancy Maas Papers MS 708., 1964-2013, 1964-1966, (Sophia Smith Collection)
