Louise Nevelson. Sky Cathedral
Louise Nevelson began making her signature wall-box sculptures in the late 1950s, assembling salvaged wood scraps from the streets and loading docks, gluing and nailing them within wooden crates that she stacked into rough grids. Positioned against the wall, her boxes boldly transcend defined boundaries between painting and sculpture. Held in place only by gravity, each of Sky Cathedral’s twenty-six boxes contains a unique assemblage of found wood—furniture parts, architectural ornaments, and rough-hewn scraps. Arranged in cell-like boxes and painted a unifying black, the discarded fragments take on new life and character—a process Nevelson likened to alchemy.