Nancy Graves was an internationally renowned multidisciplinary artist whose oeuvre incorporated sculpture, painting, drawing, watercolor, prints, the production of avant-garde films, and set designs. Graves was born in Massachusetts and attended Vassar College followed by Yale University, where she earned her MFA in painting alongside classmates such as Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Chuck Close, and Richard Serra (to whom she was married from 1964 until 1970). In 1969, she was the youngest artist, and only the fifth woman, to be selected for a solo show at the Whitney Museum of Art. This launched her career to great heights and went on to be featured in hundreds of museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide in addition to receiving large-scale site-specific sculpture commissions.
Working from what Graves described as an “objective” point of view, she transformed maps, diagrams, and other scientific sources, into artworks, and initially rose to prominence in the late 1960s with post-Minimalist sculptures that referenced archaeological sites, anthropology and natural science displays. In the 1970s, she created abstract pointillist paintings of nature photographs, NASA satellite recordings, and Lunar maps, before returning to sculpture in the latter part of the decade. Graves was one of the first contemporary artists to experiment with casting bronze and helped revive the lost wax technique with her assemblies of cast found objects in bright colors and patinas.
In the 1980s, Graves expanded her artistic horizons, gaining recognition for large, open-form sculpture commissions and growing her drawing, painting, and printmaking practices. She also made monumental wall-mounted works incorporating high-relief sculptural elements, which cast patterned shadows on the painting and walls. In the last years of her career she further pushed the boundaries of casting, using glass, resin, paper, aluminum, and bronze, in elaborate reinterpretations of her own earlier creations, effectively applying an almost archaeological approach to her own oeuvre.
A pioneering artist, Graves left behind a visually complex and multivalent body of work, with examples being held in many public collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.. Her legacy lives on in the Nancy Graves Foundation, which was established in 1996 and gives grants to individual artists, maintains an archive of her life and work, and organizes exhibitions of her art.
