graves_hampton

Nancy Graves (American 1940-1995)

Born in 1940 in Pittsfield Massachusetts, Graves' diverse body of work consists of painting, sculpture, and drawing. A graduate from Vassar College with a degree of Literature, she earned a second B.A. degree and Masters degree in Fine Arts from the School of Art and Architecture at Yale in 1964. In 1965 she was awarded the Fulbright Hayes Fellowship to study in Paris for a year, followed by a year in Italy. Her interest in art began in childhood, when Graves attended after school art classes, and it was at the age of twelve that Graves decided she would become an artist. It was as a child, that Graves began to look at and study nature, peaking an interest in natural history and science.

During the years spent at Yale, Graves was trained under the traditions of modernism as well as in the dominant Abstract Expressionist style of the previous decade. She was also influenced by the new emerging art style of Pop Art in New York, and it was her year in Paris, that Graves became especially interested in the work of David Smith, Claes Oldenburg and Bruce Nauman. Graves became inspired by their use of non-traditional art materials and began to use three-dimensional materials in her own work.

Graves began to integrate sculpture into her art, and began to work exclusively in sculpture between 1966 to 1971 and looking to her earlier childhood interest in natural history and science. She made a series of sculptures of camels and camel bones out of wood, steel, wax and oils and sought to explore subjects that were not previously seen in Western art. These figures became increasingly abstracted with a broad use of line and color. The look at the relationship between forms was continued in the production of her film titled, Izy Boukir, 1970 filmed in Morocco. The film depicted a caravan of camels, and for Graves was a study of these animals as shapes and forms, and how they related to each other in both their movement and proximity to one another.

Many of the studies Graves made during the film for her sculptures consisted of her observation of pattern and design and were later translated into the Camouflage series of paintings in 1972. Using the basic function of camouflage, Graves chose to use pattern, color, line, and form to obscure and distort the perception of natural forms. By the mid to late 1970’s Graves combined her knowledge of both painting and sculpture opting not to work exclusively in a single medium or series, but instead to work in multiple forms, colors, and works simultaneously. The late compositions are not only paintings, but they are compositions built with the same sense of spatial organization as awareness as her sculptures.

The art of Nancy Graves has been included in multiple group and solo exhibitions as well as in several public collections. Some of her solo exhibitions where held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her work is also held in the public collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Art Institute, Chicago; and the Museum des 20, Vienna.