About the artist:

Born Louise Berliawsky in Kiev, Russia in 1899, she moved as a small child to Rockland, Maine with her family. At age twenty she married Charles Nevelson and moved to New York. She later left her family to pursue her art, heading to Germany to become a student of Hans Hofmann. She also worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera. In the 1940’s, Nevelson began collecting wood objects of all types and putting them together in unusual and innovative ways. In 1957, a box of liquor she received for Christmas, with all its interior partitions gave her the idea to put her assemblages into boxes. Her sculptures were usually painted, black or sometimes white. Although her first New York show was in 1941, the exhibition that established Nevelson’s reputation as an important artist was in 1958, when she was nearly sixty. Moon Gardens + One, in which she exhibited a black wood environment prompted the chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art to include Nevelson in the 1959, Sixteen Americans show at MoMA, for which Nevelson created her famous work, Dawn’s Wedding Feast.