Louise Nevelson's Sculpture

A daring reassessment of Louise Nevelson, an icon of twentieth-century art whose innovative procedures relate to gendered, classed, and racialized forms of making Here is a book that is not only a transformative study of a single artist but also a record of the scholars own laborand her devotion.Artforum In this radical rethinking of the art of Louise Nevelson (18991988), Julia Bryan-Wilson provides a long-overdue critical account of a signature figure in postwar sculpture. A Ukraine-born Jewish immigrant, Nevelson persevered in the male-dominated New York art world. Nonetheless, her careful procedures of constructionin which she assembled found pieces of wood into elaborate structures, usually painted blackhave been little studied. Organized around a series of key operations in Nevelsons own process (dragging, coloring, joining, and facing), the book comprises four slipcased, individually bound volumes that can be read in any order. Both form and content thus echo Nevelsons own modular sculptures, the gridded boxes of which the artist herself rearranged. Exploring how Nevelsons making relates to domesticity, racialized matter, gendered labor, and the environment, Bryan-Wilson offers a sustained examination of the social and political implications of Nevelsons art. The author also approaches Nevelsons sculptures from her own embodied subjectivity as a queer feminist scholar. She forges an expansive art history that places Nevelsons assemblages in dialogue with a wide array of marginalized worldmaking and underlines the artists proclamation of allegiance to blackness.