LOUISE NEVELSON (b. 1899, Kiev, Russia) immigrated to Rockland, Maine at the age of six. In 1920, Nevelson moved to New York City where she later studied at the Art Students League. By the mid-Fifties, Nevelson produced her first series of black wood landscape sculptures. Shortly thereafter, three New York City museums acquired her work: the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art.
"In the late 1960s, Louise Nevelson embarked on a series of abstract collages notable for their pared-down and elemental simplicity. Using colored papers, cardboard boxes, paper sacks, and scraps of fabric that she discovered on the streets of her lower Manhattan neighborhood, she then arranged these fragments on plywood supports, so that the wood grain could be an active element in the composition. This method also allowed Nevelson to break with the monochrome palette of her sculptures, and to express a new degree of freedom as she broke from the grid.
Nevelson acknowledged the legacy of Cubist collages created by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the 1910s in these works. However, where Braque and Picasso toyed with word play and illusion, using fragments of text and printed materials that had the appearance of wood grain, Nevelson refrained from illusionism or any suggestion of narrative."
-excerpt from MFAH pamphlet for Kindred Spirits: Louise Nevelson & Dorothy Hood
Louise Nevelson’s work has been the subject of over 135 solo exhibitions and has twice represented the United States in the Venice Biennale (1962, 1976). Nevelson pieces can be found internationally in over eighty public museum, university, corporate and municipal collections including: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Menil Collection, Houston; Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino, Turin, Italy; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musée national d’art modern, Paris; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Storm King Art Center and Sculpture Park, Mountainville, New York; Tate Gallery, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.