First major exhibit at the Whitney Museum in NY, 1969. Works of sculpture, paintings, prints, films owned by major museums world-wide.

 

As a twelve-year-old, Nancy already knew that she wanted to be an artist. In the Berkshire Museum, where her father worked, she had been introduced to exhibits that dealt with art, history and science, and she longed to get started on the process of making art. Facilities and time for artmaking were in short supply at Northfield in the 1950s, as they were at Vassar, where Nancy majored in English, but both places fed her appetite for knowledge. She received a Fulbright-Hayes Grant in painting to work in Paris in 1965, the first of many such honors that culminated in an honorary doctorate from Yale in 1992. From Paris, she went to Florence, where she began to make her lifesize camels, made of polyurethane, latex, plaster, wood and steel, and other images from natural history. In the early seventies, she turned to paintings derived from photographs by NASA of the moon, Mars and the ocean floor. She also began to cast organic forms in bronze, producing a series of sculptures based on ideas of repetition and variation of forms made of steel, latex, gauze, wax , oil and brilliant acrylic paints. At one point, she supervised a staff of over 60 craftsmen to realize her work. Although she did not deal with feminist subjects, she was part of the first generation of women who achieved success in the artworld, and her face appeared in the position of Mary Magdalene’s in Mary Beth Edelson’s poster of Some Living American Women Artists / Last Supper (1971). She donated many works to benefits for the arts during her lifetime. She travelled on several continents to complete research on her subjects, exhibiting a level of curiosity and willingness to experiment with new materials and forms that make her work stand out even in an era of extraordinary creativity in the arts. 

 

Phoebe Townsend sent in this remembrance of Nancy.

 

Nancy Graves was my friend.  We  both went to Vassar.  Nancy was probably the most well-known person in our class of 1957.  At Vassar she majored in English, but when she went to Yale Graduate School, she discovered studio art.  Some years later I was amazed to see her famous "camel" sculptures in Time Magazine.  Over the years her bright contemporary works became very recognizable and very esteemed.  She was aesthetic & gracious--a most serious artist.

She fought brain cancer (some say it may have been caused by her work on those camels:  shellac fumes in an enclosed space.  When I last saw her at an exhibit of her work at Vassar, she was frail but elegant, leaning on her husband's arm.  Some months later she died.  Her husband told me he would never stop missing her.