Architects of Being: Louise Nevelson and Esphyr Slobodkina

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Louise Nevelson (American, born Russia (now Ukraine), 1899 - 1988), Dawn's Presence, 1972-1975, Painted wood, Chrysler Museum of Art, Gift of Walter P. Chrysler Jr., 77.1241

Louise Nevelson is quoted as once saying, “Character is the architect of the being.” The exhibition, Architects of Being: Louise Nevelson and Esphyr Slobodkina expands on this notion of artistic character and the invariable ways artists construct their personas, their practices, and their legacies.

Abstract painting by Esphyr Slobodkina — Esphyr Slobodkina (American, b. Russia, 1908–2002), Levitator #1,1950, oil on board, Heckscher Museum of Art, Gift of Martin, Richard, Nancy, and James Sinkoff in loving memory of their parents, Alice and Marvin Sinkoff, 2003.7.2.

Born just nine years apart in different regions of the former Russian Empire, Louise Nevelson (American, b. Russia (now Ukraine), 1899–1988) and Esphyr Slobodkina (American, b. Russia, 1908–2002) were both children of Jewish families who immigrated to the United States. Both had early marriages of convenience that were short-lived. Both women arrived in New York in the 1920s to study art. The parallels are poignant, including their fearless devotion to abstract art and the promotion of it, associating with mutual contemporaries as members of the American Abstract Artists group.

The exhibition comprises approximately 70 objects, including sculptures, paintings, assemblage constructions, collage, hand-sewn clothing, and jewelry, the latter alluding to the artists’ creative self-fashioning. Brought together in dialogue for the first time, Architects of Being reveals the architectural spirits of these two women as well as the ways in which they constructed their identities in a male-dominated, midcentury American art world. Overlapping themes of abstraction, installation, assemblage, and fashion, as well as migration and identity-building, illuminate how Nevelson and Slobodkina constructed legacies as bold, innovative figures in twentieth-century abstraction.

Architects of Being: Louise Nevelson and Esphyr Slobodkina is organized by the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts and supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, Alan DuBois Fund for Contemporary Craft, and Ellsworth Kelly Foundation.

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