A pioneer in the art of sculpture, Louise Berliawsky Nevelson (1899–1988) made her own world, then invited the rest of us to look more closely at what we so often dismiss. Born in Kyiv, she was a child when her family emigrated to Rockland, Maine. She carried that early uprooting as a kind of fuel, a lifelong insistence that she could build a life on her own terms.

“I adored my parents,” she said. “My mother was free-thinking and held strong socialist ideas. My father believed in equal rights for women.” In that atmosphere of conviction, Nevelson’s inner compass formed early.

“In the first grade, I already knew the pattern of my life,” she explained. She did not yet know the living of it, but she knew the line. From the first day of school until graduation, she was praised for art, again and again. She followed the trail of what came naturally, and of what would not let her go.

Influenced by Cubism, African sculpture, Matisse, and Picasso, she became best known for arranging “boxes” into sculptural walls built from pieces of wood, cast metal, and found objects. She often painted these constructions black, the color she called “the essence of the universe.”

Critics described her abstract work as mysterious, architectural, and quietly commanding. Of her practice of rescuing materials, she said, “I think what people call by the word scavenger is really a resurrection.” She took what was overlooked and made it purposeful again.

Nevelson spent the first half of her life studying art and struggling for recognition. She was 40 before her first exhibit, and in her 60s before her work supported her financially. “I never feel age,” she said. “If you have creative work, you don’t have age or time.”

Called the “Empress of Modern Art,” she was known for fierce self-expression and a refusal to shrink. “It’s a hell of a thing to be born,” she said, “and if you’re born you’re at least entitled to your own self.” That entitlement was not ego. It was a kind of spiritual claim, a right to take up space with truth.

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