Nancy Graves Art
American, 1939-1995
A sculptor of animals and American Indian shamanistic objects, filmmaker, and painter, Nancy Graves had a highly successful and varied career, primarily in New York City. In her abstract work, she united her interest in anthropology, totemic objects, cartography, and biomorphic shapes. She was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and became a graduate of Vassar College in 1961 and then Yale University's School of Art and Architecture. Graves won a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship for painting, allowing her to spend a year in Paris in 1964-65. In the next few years, she traveled in North Africa and the Near East and lived and worked in Florence, Italy where she did her first signature work, which was sculptures of life-size Bactrian camels.
In 1966, she moved to New York City and further experimented with ways to produced these sculptures by building wood and steel armatures, covering them with skins of animal embryos, stuffing the skins with polyurethane to form humps, and tinting the skins with oil paints.
In 1968, she had her first New York one-woman show at the Graham Gallery followed by her second one-woman show at the Whitney Museum in 1969. Both exhibitions featured her camels.
In 1972 at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, she made sculpture suggestive of Indian objects such as bones, skins, and feathers and added also steel rods to this motif for other exhibitions.
As a filmmaker, she has had showings in film festivals in London, New York, and Boston.
Source: Charlotte Rubinstein, "American Women Artists"(Biography provided by Fine Art San Diego)
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Neferchidea /// Abstract Geometric Expressionist Nancy Graves Female Artist
By Nancy Graves
Located in Saint Augustine, FL
Artist: Nancy Graves (American, 1939-1995)
Title: "Neferchidea"
Portfolio: Black Ground Series
*Signed and dated by Graves in pencil lower right
Year: 1987
Medium: Original Etching, ...
Category
1980s Abstract Nancy Graves Art
Materials
Drypoint, Etching, Aquatint, Intaglio
Original Graham Gallery poster (hand signed by Nancy Graves)
By Nancy Graves
Located in New York, NY
Nancy Graves
Original Graham Gallery poster (hand signed by Nancy Graves), 1968
Extremely rare vintage offset lithograph poster (hand signed by Nancy Graves)
hand signed by Nancy Graves in pencil on the front
Frame included: held in museum quality wood frame with UV plexiglass
Publisher:
Graham Gallery
This late 1960s vintage Graham Gallery poster is hand signed by Nancy Graves on the front. It was published on the occasion of her "Camels" exhibition - a groundbreaking show in the artist's young life, as she died at age 54 of breast cancer. (People forget how brave she was, a sharp counterpoint to the style of the macho Minimalists of the era, like her ex husband Richard Serra.) The following year -- in 1969 - Nancy Graves became the first woman ever to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum.
We've never seen another of these posters anywhere else in the world - let alone one hand signed by Nancy Graves.
Elegantly framed in a museum quality wood frame with UV plexiglass
Measurements:
Frame:
17 x 17.5 x 1.5 inches
Work:
10 x 10.75 inches
About Nancy Graves:
Nancy Graves (1940–1995) was born in Massachusetts. Her father worked as an accountant at the local Berkshire Museum, where art was displayed with natural history. He encouraged his daughter’s early interests in art, nature and anthropology — interests which endured for the rest of her life. After graduating from Vassar College with a degree in English Literature, Graves attended Yale University, where she earned both a B.A. and an M.A. in Art, studying alongside Chuck Close, Robert Mangold and Brice Marsden.
Following Yale, she won a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship in 1964, and began studying painting in Paris — where she also married sculptor Richard Serra, whom she had met at Yale (and from whom she would divorce in 1970). Moving on to Florence soon after, she would live a somewhat nomadic life, spending time in countries that included Morocco, Kashmir, India, Egypt, Peru, Australia and Canada.
From a point of view that she described as “objective,” Graves transformed scientific sources, such as maps and diagrams, into artworks by re-producing their complex visual information in detailed paintings and drawings. Investigating the intersections between art and scientific disciplines, Graves created compelling, formally rigorous, yet ultimately expressive works of art that examine concepts of repetition, variation, verisimilitude, and the presentation and perception of visual information.
Based in SoHo, New York, Graves gained prominence in the late 1960s as a post-Minimalist artist for innovative camel, fossil, totem, and bone sculptures that were hand formed and assembled from unusual materials such as fur, burlap, canvas, plaster, latex, wax, steel, fiberglass and wood. Made in reaction to Pop and Minimalism, these works reference archaeological sites, anthropology, and natural science displays. Suspended from the ceiling or clustered directly on the floor, these early sculptures also engage with Conceptualist ideas of display. For her Whitney Museum presentation Graves exhibited three seemingly realistic sculptures of camels in an installation that evoked taxidermy specimens and questioned issues of verisimilitude in art and science, particularly in light of their hand patched and painted fur surfaces. The exhibition elicited wide spread critical responses and established her artistic significance.
After intensely engaging with sculpture in the early 1970s, Graves returned to painting. Her detailed pointillist canvasses re-produced — in paint — images culled from documentary nature photographs, NASA satellite recordings, and Lunar maps...
Category
1960s Post-Minimalist Nancy Graves Art
Materials
Lithograph, Pencil, Offset
Approaches the Limit of I (Padon 25. Tyler Graphics 208:NG7) Signed 22/30 FRAMED
By Nancy Graves
Located in New York, NY
Nancy Graves
Approaches the Limit of I (Padon 25), 1981
Nine color lithograph on white Arches Cover mould-made paper
Pencil signed, dated and numbered 22/30 by Nancy Graves on the fr...
Category
1980s Abstract Expressionist Nancy Graves Art
Materials
Lithograph, Pencil
Rope Trap /// Abstract Expressionist Female Nancy Graves Huge Metal Sculpture NY
By Nancy Graves
Located in Saint Augustine, FL
Artist: Nancy Graves (American, 1939-1995)
Title: "Rope Trap"
*Titled, signed, and dated by Graves (inscribed into the metal) on red cylinder lower right
Year: 1985
Medium: Original ...
Category
1980s Abstract Expressionist Nancy Graves Art
Materials
Bronze, Metal
Untitled (colorful, abstract print)
By Nancy Graves
Located in New York, NY
This edition was commissioned in 1980 by Lincoln Center to commemorate its 10th Annual Community Festival. The signed and numbered edition is 144 was printed at Fine Creations.
Born in 1940 (Pittsfield, MA), Nancy Graves explored the interplay between the replication of nature and the formal values of abstract art in her wide variety of works throughout her life. Thought she first gained attention with her realistic, life-sized camel sculptures, she was later inspired to draw, paint and print by visual representations of natural phenomena, like weather and moon maps...
Category
1980s Nancy Graves Art
Materials
Screen
Calibrate
By Nancy Graves
Located in New York, NY
Nancy Graves
Calibrate, 1981
16 color etching, aquatint, engraving and lithograph. Printed from 5 copper plates, 1 zinc plate and 1 stone
Hand signed, numbered, dated on the front
Fr...
Category
1980s Abstract Nancy Graves Art
Materials
Aquatint, Lithograph, Etching
“RBY” 1980 Large Very colorful abstract yellow red blue green white oil/canvas
By Nancy Graves
Located in Rancho Santa Fe, CA
Signed, titled and dated verso 1980 (11–’80)
Provenance: Irving Galleries, Palm Beach, Florida 1985;
Private Collection, Palm Springs, CA
Exhibitions: M. Kno...
Category
1980s Abstract Nancy Graves Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Canopic Prestidigitation
By Nancy Graves
Located in Santa Fe, NM
Over the course of her prolific and radical career, Nancy Graves became a master of translating the primary data of soft science disciplines such as archaeology and anthropology into empirically informed, expressive works, such as "Canopic Prestidigitation."
A large-scale, 23-color lithograph, Canopic Prestidigitation is as technically masterful as it is conceptually layered.
Graves combines the Egyptian visual lexicon of the afterlife and allusions to European Renaissance masterworks to catalyze heuristic understandings of cross-cultural communication—Figures rendered in the hybridized profile-portrait style of Egyptian hieroglyphs float through a swirling and subtle maze of neo-classical architectural suggestions, while a disembodied hand reminiscent of Michelangelo’s "The Creation of Adam" reaches out through a frothing red portal. A cast-paper representation of Horus perches in the bottom right corner of the work, a nod to the symbolic language of the print and Graves’ multi-disciplined artistic approach. When read together, the elements of Canopic Prestidigitation become an artistic interpretation of the intangible qualities of social science...
Category
1990s Op Art Nancy Graves Art
Materials
Archival Paper, Handmade Paper, Lithograph
New York State Governor's Arts Award, unique signed painted bronze sculpture
By Nancy Graves
Located in New York, NY
Nancy Graves
New York State Governor's Arts Award, 1988
Bronze, polychrome patina and baked enamel on base with Award plaque
10 1/4 × 7 × 10 1/4 inches
Ha...
Category
1980s Abstract Expressionist Nancy Graves Art
Materials
Bronze, Enamel
Exhibition Poster (Hand signed and inscribed to the founder of Tallix Foundry)
By Nancy Graves
Located in New York, NY
Nancy Graves
Nancy Graves: A Survey 1969/1980 (Hand signed and inscribed to Dick Polich of Tallix), 1980
Offset lithograph poster (hand signed, dated and ...
Category
1980s Abstract Expressionist Nancy Graves Art
Materials
Offset
To Be Little Consciousness - Original Aquatint by Nancy Graves - 1991
By Nancy Graves
Located in Roma, IT
To Be Little Consciousness is an original contemporary artwork realied by Nancy Graves in 1991.
Mixed colored aquatint and soft varnish.
Hand signed an...
Category
1980s Abstract Nancy Graves Art
Materials
Aquatint
Vertigo
By Nancy Graves
Located in New York, NY
Signed and numbered in pencil with studio blindstamp
Color screenprint on Arches Cover paper
29.75 x 35.5 inches
Category
1980s Nancy Graves Art
Materials
Screen
Large Nancy Graves Color Aquatint Drypoint Etching Screenprint Metallic Gold
By Nancy Graves
Located in Surfside, FL
Nancy Graves, American (1939-1995)
Borborygmi (1988)
aquatint, drypoint, gold leaf and screenprint on Fabriano Artistico paper
pencil hand signed by arti...
Category
1980s Contemporary Nancy Graves Art
Materials
Screen
Borborygmi
By Nancy Graves
Located in New York, NY
Borborygmi, 1988
Signed, dated, and numbered in pencil in lower margin
Aquatint with colors
49 x 49 inches
Category
1980s Nancy Graves Art
Materials
Aquatint
"RBY" 1980 oil/canvas - Large Very colorful abstract yellow red blue green white
By Nancy Graves
Located in Rancho Santa Fe, CA
Signed, titled and dated verso 1980 (11–’80) "RBY"
oil on canvas
Provenance: Irving Galleries, Palm Beach, Florida 1985;
Private Collection, Palm Springs, CA
...
Category
1980s Abstract Nancy Graves Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
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Previously Available Items
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Lunar Landscape VI
By Nancy Graves
Located in Long Island City, NY
Artist: Nancy Stevenson Graves, American (1940 - 1995)
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Year: 1972
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Equivalent (Padon 22)
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Large Nancy Graves Metallic Screen Print on Paper
By Nancy Graves
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Beautiful large metallic screen print by Nancy Graves. Artists Proof edition 6/9. pencil signed lower right.
Nancy Graves (December 23, 1939 – October 21,...
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Nancy Graves art for sale on 1stDibs.
Find a wide variety of authentic Nancy Graves art available for sale on 1stDibs. You can also browse by medium to find art by Nancy Graves in paint, aquatint, etching and more. Much of the original work by this artist or collective was created during the 20th century and is mostly associated with the abstract style. Not every interior allows for large Nancy Graves art, so small editions measuring 7 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of Arthur Secunda, Theodoros Stamos, and Carmen Cicero. Nancy Graves art prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $735 and tops out at $120,000, while the average work can sell for $7,500.