Collection View: Louise Nevelson

Through Aug 10

Book ticketsBecome a Member
Five tall, dark abstract sculptures stand on a white platform in a bright gallery with large windows.
Five tall, dark abstract sculptures stand on a white platform in a bright gallery with large windows.

Installation view of Collection View: Louise Nevelson (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, April 9-August 20, 2025). From left to right: Present Universe III, 1985; Rain Forest Column XII, 1967; Rain Forest Column VII, 1962–64; Rain Forest Column XXIII, 1964–67; Dream House XXIII, 1972. © 2025 Estate of Louise Nevelson/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Ron Amstutz

On view
Floor 5

Open: Apr 9–Aug 10, 2025

"I see New York City as a great big sculpture," Louise Nevelson once remarked. Born in Pereiaslav, Ukraine, Nevelson (1899–1988) lived and worked in Manhattan from the 1920s through the 1980s. Known for her bold monochrome assemblages of stacked and composed found objects, Nevelson was captivated by the city's ever-changing skyline and saw creative potential in discarded materials that she scavenged throughout its streets at night. By painting these sculptures a single color (black), she cloaked the specific, identifying details of disparate objects such as duck decoys, lettuce crates, and pieces of rebar, transforming them into abstract shapes. Collection View: Louise Nevelson reimagines the relationship between Nevelson's work and New York, highlighting the dynamic interplay she sought to suggest in her work between motion and stillness, light and shadow, dawn and dusk.

Nevelson had a long and deep relationship with the Whitney Museum, which organized her first retrospective in 1967. Today the Museum is one of the largest repositories of her work, with over ninety sculptures, drawings, and prints in the collection, many of them gifts of the artist. The works gathered in this exhibition, which span four decades, offer a special opportunity to shine a light on this self-proclaimed “architect of shadows.”

Collection View: Louise Nevelson is organized by Kim Conaty, Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, with Roxanne Smith, Senior Curatorial Assistant, and Antonia Pocock, Curatorial Assistant.

Collection View: Louise Nevelson is part of Outside the Box programming, which is supported by a generous endowment from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation.

Events

View all

On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

On the Hour projects can contain motion and sound. To respect your accessibility settings autoplay is disabled.