Architects of Being

About

Born just nine years apart in Ukraine and Siberia, respectively, Louise Nevelson and Esphyr Slobodkina were both children of Jewish families who fled Russian governmental repression and conflict. Both made early marriages of convenience or convention that were short-lived. Both went to New York in the 1920s, struggling to become artists amid the Great Depression. Both overcame the accepted modes of making, moving between art forms in expansive, category-defying ways. The parallels are poignant, including their similarly fearless devotion to abstract art in an era that had yet to fully embrace it. Architects of Being pays homage to these two women who were direct and dauntless.

Fittingly, this book draws its title from Nevelson’s insight that “there’s something very important about character: character is structure. Character is the architecture of the being.” The connection between inner self and outward manifestation—both one’s art and one’s self-fashioning—is at the heart of Architects of Being. This richly illustrated and expertly researched exhibition catalog celebrates Nevelson’s and Slobodkina’s artistic journeys and architectural affinities, expanding our understanding of how these pioneering figures dissolved boundaries between art forms in ways that prefigured what we see throughout the art world today.

Editor and Contributors

Catherine Walworth is the Jackye and Curtis Finch, Jr., Curator of Drawings at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts and the author of Soviet Salvage: Imperial Debris, Revolutionary Reuse, and Russian Constructivism.

Adrienne Montare is a licensed architect, Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and former executive director of AIA South Carolina.

Chelsea Pierce is McKinnon Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Chrysler Museum of Art.

Lisa Hayes Williams is curator and head of exhibitions at the New Britain Museum of American Art.

Praise

“Architects of Being sets two imposing artists against a vivid backdrop of New York City struggling under an economic depression, Robert Moses’s wrecking ball, and the rise of American abstraction. In the midst of these and other more personal obstacles, Nevelson and Slobodkina built independent artistic lives of inspired audacity. In telling their stories, the book’s authors take us on a romp through the mid-twentieth-century New York art scene, which both women navigated with fashionable flair. The exploration of Nevelson’s largely black-and-white world benefits from the colorful parallel story of Slobodkina, while Slobodkina’s ‘anything goes’ approach to transforming objects is viewed through the lens of Nevelson’s assemblage practice. Over everything is the pervasive presence of architecture—art and artistic personas constructed, apartments refurbished, houses designed, and art studios that took over domestic spaces. In the era of McCarthyism and Leave It to Beaver conformism, Nevelson and Slobodkina led dazzlingly original lives.”
—Susan Fisher Sterling, Ph.D., Alice West Director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts