One of the foremost sculptors of the 20th century, Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) was born Leah Berliawsky near Kyiv, now in Ukraine. She immigrated to Rockland, Maine, with her family in 1905. In 1920, she married Charles Nevelson, a shipping merchant, and moved to New York City, where she studied drama and later enrolled at the Art Students League. Throughout the early 1930s, Nevelson traveled across Europe and briefly attended Hans Hofmann’s school in Munich. Upon returning to the U.S. in 1932, she resumed her studies with Hofmann, who had moved his school to New York.

Nevelson had her first one-person exhibition at the Nierendorf Gallery in 1941, the first of several with the gallery throughout the decade. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, she traveled to Guatemala and Mexico to view Pre-Columbian art and experience the Mayan ruins first-hand, which had a profound impact on her art. From the mid-1950s onward, she created a series of monumental all-black sculptures, often incorporating found or discarded wood, introducing a unique visual language that cemented her place in American art. “The way I think is collage,” she is quoted as saying. “When you put things together, things that other people have thrown out, you’re really bringing them to life – a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created.”