“Moving-Static-Moving-Figure” by Louise Nevelson, 1947, terracotta, bronze, wood, paint and casting, 21 3/8 x 14 1/2 x 11 1/2.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in Pereiaslav, Ukraine (formerly the Russian Empire) in 1899, Leah (Berliawsky) Nevelson’s family immigrated to the U.S. in 1902. She took her first drawing class in 1924, and from there studied under notable artists in a variety of fields, including assisting Diego Rivera with his murals for the New Workers School.
Nevelson worked as an art teacher and created small-scale abstract works throughout the 1930s and 1940s, landing her first solo exhibition in 1941. She finally achieved critical acclaim in the late 1950s, around the time her sculptures became large-scale and she began designing her exhibitions as complete environments.
Nevelson served with many art organizations, including as the first female president of Artists Equity Association’s New York chapter in 1962 and the first female national president of the Artists Equity Association in 1963.
She continued to work well into her 80s, creating public works and other large-scale sculptures with wood, steel and plexiglas, before she died in 1988.
In a very male-dominated era, Nevelson’s dramatic sculptures paved the way for the dialogues of the feminist art movement of the 1970s by breaking the taboo that only men’s artwork could be large-scale. Her works initiated an era in which women’s life history became suitable subject matter for monumental artistic representation.
ABOUT THE EXHIBIT
The exhibition title “Architects of Being” alludes to the architectural spirits of Louise Nevelson and Esphyr Slobodkina, brought together in dialogue for the first time, as well as the ways in which they constructed their identities in a midcentury American art world.
Nevelson called herself an “architect of shadow” and built monumental structures from the scraps of razed buildings. Slobodkina was a painter who extended the use of color, form and texture to transform her surroundings. They were world builders. But first, they built themselves — as immigrants, working women and creative pioneers of abstraction — who bravely set out to become artists at the start of The Great Depression.
In this groundbreaking exhibition, each woman’s story amplifies the other’s. In their artworks — which reveal the two as fellow travelers in the legacy of cubism, surrealism and constructivism — assemblage is an important unifying theme. Works include found object sculptures, mixed media reliefs, collage, painting, jewelry and clothing, including some of Nevelson’s most iconic fashion statements.
Descriptions provided by the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts.
See Nevelson’s work in the exhibit “Architects of Being: Louise Nevelson and Esphyr Slobodkina” on display at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts beginning Oct. 3.