Author Description

"Nancy Graves is one of the truly remarkable art talents of the current generation. A protean creator, she has produced work of startling originality and beauty as a painter, graphic artist, filmmaker, and sculptor. From Graves's first three-dimensional work - her camels - to her most recent works in bronze, her sculpture has been innovative and influential not only for its aesthetic impact but also because it has stretched the boundaries of sculptural media. Graves's bronzes are composed to a variety of elements, many of which are cast from such natural, organic, and/or everyday objects as pretzels, sardines, leaves, and cooking scissors. These works are then colored through a combination of techniques - polyurethane paint, fired enamel, and patination - to an extent that is unmatched in the work of any other modernist sculptor. The Sculpture of Nancy Graves is both a monograph and a catalogue raisonné of all her sculpture to date (with virtually every work reproduced in color!). It includes fascinating essays by E.A. Carmean, Jr., director of the Fort Worth Art Museum; Robert Hughes, art critic of Time magazine; Michael Edward Shapiro, curator of 19th- and 20th-century art at the Saint Louis Art Museum; and Linda L. Cathcart, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. The Sculpture of Nancy Graves is published in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition of Graves's sculpture organized by the Fort Worth Art Museum; it will open at the Hirshhorn Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and subsequently travel to Fort Worth, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum." --