Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Colour, Join Face

Julia Bryan-Wilson in conversation with Jo Applin
In her new book on the artist Louise Nevelson, Julia Bryan-Wilson reassesses Nevelson’s iconic sculpture, assembled from found wood into elaborated sculptures, usually painted black. Despite her status as a leading sculptor of post-war abstract art, there has been little scholarly writing on Nevelson. Rather than a traditional monograph, Bryan-Wilson’s book is modelled after Nevelson’s art, split into four interchangeable volumes, in an act of gathering, sorting, and putting together sometimes incongruent parts. Across the four volumes-drag, colour, join, and face-Bryan-Wilson deploys methods that include archival research, historical rigour, and close looking as well as speculative conjectures, tendentious asides, wilful readings, anachronistic interpretations, and hypothetical comparisons. Following Nevelson’s nailed-together sculptures in which the means of construction are fully on display, with nails still poking out, Bryan-Wilson also implicates herself in this project, and narrates her own frequently disjointed process of researching, writing, and hammering together this book. In conversation with Jo Applin, Bryan-Wilson will discuss the work of Nevelson, the work of working on Nevelson, and our tasks as art historians for thinking about the art, life, and work of an artist.
Julia Bryan-Wilson (PhD, UC Berkeley, 2004) is Professor of LGBTQ+ Art History and core faculty in Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender Curator-at-Large at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). She is the author of four books: Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (University of California, 2009, named a best book of the year by the New York Times and Artforum); Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (with Glenn Adamson, Thames & Hudson, 2016); Fray: Art and Textile Politics (University of Chicago, 2017, a New York Times best art book of the year and winner of the Frank Jewett Mather Award, the Robert Motherwell Book Award, and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize); and Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face (Yale, 2023).
Bryan-Wilson’s show Louise Nevelson: Persistence, was an official Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale in 2022; and with Andrea Andersson, she curated Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, which opened at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans in 2017 and travelled to the Berkeley Art Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, the ICA Philadelphia, and MOCA North Miami.
Organised by Jo Applin, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the History of Art and Director of the Centre for American Art