Curated by Brooke Kamin Rapaport
The Jewish Museum is now staging Louise Nevelson’s first US survey since 1967, an exhibition both long overdue and somehow of the moment, given the swarm of young artists quoting her distinct formal vocabulary. Guest curator Kamin Rapaport positions sixty-six sculptures and installations—antihierarchical juxtapositions of appropriated materials, such as ornamental molding, fabric, and discarded timber—and works on paper, all made between 1928 and 1988 (the year of the artist’s death), against an archival backdrop in which Nevelson’s struggles as a Russian Jew growing up in WASP-y Rockland, Maine, figure prominently. The show and catalogue—with essays by the curator, critic Arthur C. Danto, and others—promise a reevaluation of a sculptor for whom life’s bric-a-brac, collected and alchemically recombined, offered a kind of a grace. Travels to the De Young Museum, San Francisco, Oct. 27, 2007–Jan. 13, 2008.
