LOUISE NEVELSON ASSEMBLAGES

Level: Primary, Junior, Middle School, High School

Grades: 1-12 Age: 6 to 18+yrs | Written by: Nicole Smith
[Nicole is an art teacher from Vancouver, BC, Canada]

Summary:

Students will discover the art of Louise Nevelson as they enjoy making art out of
recycled materials, or "junk".

Objectives:

The student :

 will become familiar with the work of the New York based, Modernist Sculptor,
Louise Nevelson.
 will make use of garbage.
 will experiment with monochromatic form.

What You Need:

 Images of Louise Nevelson’s Assemblages (Recommended book: The Sculpture

of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend (Jewish Museum) )
 Cardboard: half a box or a flat piece to mount to the wall.
 Reusable materials: cardboard forms from inside display boxes work well. You
can use anything that will hold the paint. Plastic does not work well.
 Black Tempera paint
 Brushes
 Glue guns
 Scissors
What You Do:

1. Cut a cardboard box in half to use as the frame for the piece. Otherwise, you can
cut out a large, square, flat piece of cardboard for the back support.
2. Chose your objects carefully and arrange them aesthetically inside the box or on
the square.You may want to cut pieces to fit. For older students, think about
what the objects were before and how they will be read into the piece when
finished.
3. Glue the pieces in place.

4. Paint the entire sculpture black. Don’t forget the sides and the back.
5. If you have a group of students that have each done a box, you can assemble
them back to back in a three-dimensional sculpture. If you have assembled the
sculpture on the flat cardboard you can attach it to the wall for a similar affect.
Nevelson did both in her practice.
About Louise Nevelson

Born: 1900; Died 1988

Louise Nevelson was a towering figure in postwar American art, exerting great influence
with her monumental installations, innovative sculptures made of found objects, and
celebrated public artworks. The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson focuses on all phases of
the artist’s remarkable ascent to the top of the art world, from her groundbreaking
works of the 1940s to complex pieces completed in the late 1980s. Nevelson’s
flamboyant style and carefully cultivated persona enhanced her reputation as an artist
of the first rank.
Nevelson’s work examines a wide variety of important issues and themes throughout
her career, including the role of monochromatic color in her painted wooden sculpture;
the art-historical context of her work; her acclaimed large-scale commissioned
artworks, which established her as a central figure in the public art revival of the late
1960s; and her "self-fashioning" as a celebrated artist, particularly her origins as a
Ukrainian-born Jewish immigrant to the United States.

A revolutionary 20th-century artist.

Portrait of Louise Nevelson wearing two wooden necklaces and a bracelet in her living
room / Photograph by Ugo Mulas / ca. 1965