Nancy Graves (1939-1995) was born in Pittsfield, MA, and earned her MFA from Yale University in 1964. Throughout her illustrious career, Graves employed a multidisciplinary approach to creating art, developing a body of sculptures, paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints, as well as multiple avant-garde films and set designs. Merging scientific inquiry with artistic experimentation, her works evoke archaeological sites, anthropological studies, and natural science displays.
Graves rose to prominence in 1969, when she became the youngest artist and only the fifth woman to have her work shown in a solo presentation at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Exhibited were her Camels, a series of life-size sculptures that recall taxidermic displays. During this period she experimented with unconventional materials—fur, burlap, wax, fiberglass, and wood—to create biomorphic forms resembling bones, fossils, and totems.
In the 1970s, Graves returned to painting, extracting imagery from nature documentaries, satellite recordings, and lunar maps and transforming these sources into abstract, pointillist compositions. Later in the decade, she resumed her sculptural practice and became a trailblazer for the revival of the ancient technique of lost-wax casting. She created playful assemblages that combined bronze casts of organic and mechanical objects. During this period, her sculptures and paintings increasingly informed one another: the bronze surfaces were colored with bright patinas and enamel coatings, and her paintings echoed the dimensionality and amalgamated elements of her sculptures.
By the late 1980s, Graves fully integrated painting and sculpture in a series of wall-mounted works in which polychrome sculptural elements were attached to the surfaces of painted canvases.
Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at Whitney Museum of Art, NY (1969); Museum of Modern Art, NY (1971); ICA Philadelphia, PA (1972); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (1971, 1973, 1995); Albright-Knox Gallery of Art, NY (1974, 1980); Musuem of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (1975, 2000); The Fort Worth Art Museum, TX (1987); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, DC (1987); Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY (1987); Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany (1992, 2013); Cincinnati Art Museum, OH (1993); and Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, MO (1996).
Graves is represented in the collections of major public institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; National Gallery of Art, DC; National Gallery of Canada, ON; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of Art, NY; Walker Art Center, MN; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, DC; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL. Catalogues raisonnés were published on her printed work (1996) and sculpture (1987). Locks Gallery has exhibited Graves's work since 1991.
