Collection View: Louise Nevelson

This presentation brings together over fifteen sculptures by Louise Nevelson drawn from the Whitney’s collection and sets them against the backdrop of New York City, a place that long inspired Nevelson in her sculptural assemblages. Born in Pereiaslav, Ukraine, Nevelson (1899–1988) lived and worked in Manhattan from the 1920s through the 1980s. Known for her bold monochrome assemblages of stacked and composed found objects, Nevelson was captivated by the city's ever-changing skyline and saw creative potential in discarded materials that she scavenged throughout its streets at night. “I see New York City as a great big sculpture,” she once remarked. By painting these sculptures black, she cloaked the specific, identifying details of disparate objects such as duck decoys, lettuce crates, and pieces of rebar, transforming them into abstract shapes. Collection View: Louise Nevelson reimagines the relationship between Nevelson’s work and New York, highlighting the dynamic interplay she sought to suggest in her work between motion and stillness, light and shadow, dawn and dusk.

Nevelson had a long and deep relationship with the Whitney Museum, which organized her first retrospective in 1967. Today the Museum is one of the largest repositories of her work, with over ninety sculptures, drawings, and prints in the collection, many of them gifts of the artist. The works gathered in this exhibition, which span four decades, offer a special opportunity to shine a light on this self-proclaimed “architect of shadows.”

Collection View: Louise Nevelson is organized by Kim Conaty, Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, with Roxanne Smith, Senior Curatorial Assistant, and Antonia Pocock, Curatorial Assistant.

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