Celebrating Louise Nevelson at 125

To mark Louise Nevelson’s 125th birthday this year, the Art Students League of New York will host a panel discussion with Pace Founder and Chairman Arne Glimcher, who has been exhibiting her work since 1961 and was a close friend of the artist during her lifetime, and Columbia University Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson, author of Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face (Yale University Press, 2023) and curator of the acclaimed exhibition Louise Nevelson: Persistence, a collateral event of the 2022 Venice Biennale. Moderated by Pace’s Chief Curator Oliver Shultz, this live discussion of Nevelson’s life and legacy will be held at the Arts Student League, where she studied in the early years of her career, on October 1. The artist will also be honored at the League’s 2024 Gala on November 4 with a posthumous award.

A brief history of Nevelson’s time at the League, accompanied by images of her student records from the school, follows below.

Louise Nevelson was active at the Art Students League of New York from 1924 to 1934—a significant period in her life and career. Nevelson returned to art after the birth of her son Michael in 1922, and, after studying in Europe, the League welcomed Nevelson back to New York in the 1930s.

While at the League, she studied life drawing with some of the institution’s most well-known instructors: Hans Hofmann, Kenneth Hayes Miller, Kimon Nicolaides, and George Grosz.

In her oral history with the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Nevelson says of her instructors, “All of them recognized there was something… they all encouraged me.”

Of Hoffmann specifically she said, “Once in class at the League, he picked up one of my abstract figures and said to the class, ‘You see this, this is bigger than life.’” During this time she also met and was influenced by other instructors, including William Zorach and Chaim Gross, as well as fellow students like Anna Walinska.