Nancy Grossman: Tough Life Diary

Nancy Grossman: Tough Life Diary brings together work from the past fifty years to demonstrate the wide-ranging, challenging nature of this important yet still largely under-appreciated artist. For over five decades, Grossman has created a powerful body of work that combines exquisite craftsmanship with a long-standing exploration of the nature of violence and power. The exhibition will feature a range of work from the artist’s immense oeuvre, including drawing, painting, printmaking, collage, assemblage, and sculpture.

Born in New York City in 1940, Nancy Grossman moved with her family to a farm in Oneonta, New York at the age of five. Her parents worked in the garment industry and at sixteen Grossman joined them as a “dart and gusset girl,” influencing her future use of leather, zippers, dyes, pattern making, and sewing in her artwork. From 1957 to 1962, Grossman studied at Pratt Institute, where she received her BFA. At Pratt, Grossman met artist Richard Lindner, who would become a longtime mentor and friend, and experimented in a range of mediums including lithography, woodcut, drawing, and painting. Grossman’s penchant for material experimentation—which would only expand throughout her career—was very much at odds with the prevailing sentiment at the time to develop a signature style. Abstract Expressionism dominated the New York art scene, and Grossman was loosely connected with many of these artists and often patronized popular haunts such as the Cedar Tavern and Max’s Kansas City. Yet she also felt distinctly aware of her differences: “It was simply too much of a challenge for a young woman to announce that she was an artist,” Grossman explained in the 1960s. “Because all artists were feminized, male artists bent over backwards to present their most macho aspect.”

After traveling Europe in 1962 on Pratt’s Ida C. Haskell Award for Foreign Travel, Grossman returned to New York. Two years later, at only twenty-three, she had her first solo exhibition at New York’s Krasner Gallery of collages, constructions, drawings, and paintings; by 1967 her work was featured in three additional solo shows at the gallery. 1964 also marked her move into a large studio in Chinatown’s Eldridge Street, where she continued working for thirty-five years. As Arlene Raven noted, her studio’s “change of scale proved revolutionary for Grossman’s work: she began to make wall assemblages and free-standing constructions of at least six feet by four feet.” Using discarded cloth, leather, and metal parts, Grossman fashioned “chaotic, tumbling reliefs that bring Abstract Expressionist brushwork into real space.” During the mid-1960s, Grossman also began experimenting with the form and subject of a “totem"—a theme she would continue working with for several decades. Her freestanding totems of 1966 and 1967 bring together an array of found objects, such as typewriters, steel brushes, corn huskers, and metal signs forming six-foot high pillars to the detritus of 1960s America.

In a 1969 solo exhibition at New York’s Cordier and Ekstrom Gallery, Grossman first exhibited her life-size leather covered heads, a body of work she would continue through the mid-1990s. Carved out of wood and tautly covered with leather (often recycled from old leather jackets), Grossman’s sculptural heads quickly made her both “renowned and suspect” (Raven). Frequently described as "disturbing,” these images “blew conventional images of femininity to smithereens,“ as critic Holland Cotter noted. Typically taking over a year to complete, each head is carefully carved out of wood, often fitted with dentures and poured liquid rubber molds before tautly covered with black leather, and adorned with zippers, spike, straps, and horns. Cordier and Ekstrom Gallery represented the artist for the next twelve years, including four solo exhibitions during the 1970s.