Louise Nevelson Plaza

Officially opened in 1978, Louise Nevelson Plaza was one of the first plazas in New York City to honor a woman and the first to honor an artist. It occupies a site—on William Street between Maiden Lane and Liberty Street—that once included Legion Memorial Square and an empty lot.

When an opportunity arose in the 1970s to reinvigorate the space, Doris C. Freedman, founder and then-Director of the Public Art Fund and a champion of new public art commissions throughout the city, contacted Pace Gallery and suggested a work by Nevelson. Under the auspices of New York Mayor Abraham Beame and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Nevelson was invited to redesign the space.

She produced Shadows and Flags for the plaza in 1977, with support from the gallery, and in particular from Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz, then-Director of New Commissions at Pace. The sculpture park incorporated not only seven of Nevelson’s canonical forms but also trees and benches. The artist specifically designed each element to function as an integral part of the space. The site was dedicated as Louise Nevelson Plaza in 1978 by David Rockefeller and New York Mayor Edward Koch.

Renovation and Reopening:  2004 - 2010
 

Within decades of its inauguration, Louise Nevelson Plaza had fallen into grave disrepair. Nevelson’s sculptures had faded, and one had been hit by a car and never replaced. In addition, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the plaza required a security post for monitoring the nearby entrance to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.  The booth’s placement interfered with Nevelson’s original design, so the benches she had arranged asymmetrically were rearranged to provide visibility for the security post.

In 2004, New York Gov. George Pataki announced that “the damaged and collapsing plaza” would be transformed into a “tree-filled open space.” Organized as a collaborative effort of the city’s Department of Design and Construction (DDC), the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) and the New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT), the renovation was part of the Liberty Street Reconstruction Project and was funded by LMDC.

Smith-Miller+Hawkinson Architects (SMH) of New York was commissioned to do the plaza redesign. SMH replaced the Federal Reserve Bank’s guardhouse with a granite box to mirror the aesthetic weight of Nevelson’s sculptures. It also redesigned the plaza’s landscaping, lighting and benches. Smaller trees were planted, and the architects used an indirect lighting plan, as well as illuminated glass benches, to open the space as a new urban oasis. Nevelson’s sculptures—restored to their original condition—remain the focus of the plaza.

The plaza was reopened to the public in December 2010.

Sculpture: Shadows and Flags
 

Sought after for her large-scale sculptural works, Nevelson was also one of the first artists, and the only woman, to become a central figure in the burgeoning public art revival of the 1960s. She created more than 22 public commissions in her lifetime. Around the time of her Shadows and Flags commission, Nevelson had produced public works such as Night Presence IV (1972) on Park Avenue at 92nd Street, New York; Sky Gate – New York (1978) at the World Trade Center (destroyed in 2001); Atmosphere and Environment X (1969) at Princeton University; Bicentennial Dawn (1976) at Bryne-Greene Federal Courthouse, Philadelphia; Celebration (1976-77) at Pepsico World Headquarters, Purchase, NY; and Chapel of the Good Shepherd  (1977) at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, New York.

As with her other major public works, Nevelson’s working process for Shadows and Flags involved salvaging found materials such as scrap steel and templates for machine forms, which she assembled by hand, using large cranes and ladders to create a model from which to cast the final sculpture in welded Cor-Ten steel, which she then painted monochrome black.

'I have lived in New York for nearly 60 years, and it has been one grand love affair from the day I put my foot here. New York is a city of collage, a collage of our time. It has all kinds of people, all kinds of races, and all kinds of religions in it, and the whole thing is magnificent.' -- Louise Nevelson

Interested in creating public works with a relationship to their architectural setting, Nevelson first viewed the plaza site on William Street from upper-story office windows. With this perspective in mind, she opted to “place the sculptures on ‘legs’ so they would appear to float like flags."[1]

Nevelson was in every respect involved in the plaza’s design, treating the site as an environmental installation rather than a series of individual sculptures. According to Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz, who worked closely with the artist on the commission:  Nevelson “picked the trees, she designed the benches, picked the pavings, she placed the sculptures.”[2]

Shadows and Flags was fabricated at Lippincott, North Haven, CT, and is comprised of seven sculptures, the largest of which is nearly 70 feet high, dominating the plaza’s western edge. Each sculpture reaches vertically atop a narrow base, defying gravity as cantilevered elements reach out like tree limbs. Incorporating curling pieces of steel, cylinders, planes, and four-sided boxes, the sculptures are painted in Nevelson’s customary monochrome black and convey a sense of dynamism and movement in their composition. The original plaza featured heavy stone benches, placed asymmetrically throughout the space, as well as Callery Pear trees. While the artist complained of the small size of the trees at the time of their planting, they eventually grew to overtake the sculptures.

Original Plaza funding and general support:

Fabricated at Lippincott, North Haven, CT, collection of the City of New York, gift of Mildred Andrews Fund

Developers:

Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association
City of New York Office of Development
The Royal Bank and Trust Company
The Chubb Corporation
American International Group
Chase Manhattan Bank
Continental Insurance Companies
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
The Home Insurance Company
Sylvan Lawrence Company

Donors (in 1978):

American International Group
The Chase Manhattan Bank, N.A.
The Chubb Corporation
The Continental Insurance Companies
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
The Home Insurance Company
Sylvan Lawrence Company
The Royal Bank and Trust Company
Louise Nevelson
Anonymous Donor

Louise Nevelson: Her Life and Career

Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) is recognized as one of the most iconic American sculptors of the 20th century. A Ukrainian-born Jewish immigrant to the United States who spent the vast majority of her more than 60-year career in New York City, she is best known for her monochromatic found-object wooden sculptures that combine the exuberance of abstract expressionism with the mystery of cubist collage. However, Nevelson also produced a remarkably diverse body of work that confounds easy categorization.

She employed such diverse materials as wood, Plexiglas, aluminum, enamel, steel and bronze to create not only gallery-scaled sculptures, but dense, room-sized assemblages that verge on installation art, and monumental public works designed for architectural settings. While each work composed an assemblage of these found materials, the uniform monochromatic surface—painted black, and for specific works, white, and gold—fused the elements into whole structures.

Nevelson drew upon established European modernist styles, yet refused assimilation within any category. Instead, she employed a unique additive approach and invested her subject matter with personalized symbolic meaning to deftly subvert assumptions about the heroic masculinity of sculpture and point the way forward toward feminist art. 

'When I look at the city from my point of view, I see New York City as a great big sculpture' -- Louise Nevelson

Nevelson’s artwork has been the subject of numerous major exhibitions, including a recent retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 2007. Her work is held in private and public collections throughout America and internationally. Still, for much of her career, she faced great struggles to achieve recognition in a male-dominated art world. Although she began working in the 1930s—studying under Hans Hoffman and at the Art Students League and befriending such prominent artists as Diego Rivera and William DeKooning—it was not until the seminal 1959 exhibition, Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, that her work began to achieve wide recognition.

As her reputation grew, Nevelson blurred the line between art and life by complementing her work with an enigmatic public persona, characterized by flamboyant dress, colorful headscarves, false eyelashes, and a commanding personal presence. She even self-fashioned her own tumultuous life story; her accounts of her childhood and early years hovered between fact and fiction. As her close friend and dealer Arnold Glimcher once commented, “Nevelson’s life itself is her greatest work of art.” [3]

References:

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution - Louise Nevelson papers, circa 1903-1979
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/louise-nevelson-papers-9093/more

Louise Nevelson Foundation
http://www.louisenevelsonfoundation.org/

Studio International: Louise Nevelson: The Artist and the Legend
http://www.studio-international.co.uk/sculpture/nevelson.asp

Public Art Fund
www.publicartfund.org

Pace Gallery
http://thepacegallery.com/

Smith-Miller+Hawkinson Architects (SMH)
http://www.smharch.com/

Additional resources:

Louise Nevelson speaks with Hilton Kramer at the Guggenheim in 1986 on the occasion of an award. Video by Nelson Sullivan. 9:43
http://artforum.com/video/id=26882&mode=large

American Architecture Now: Louise Nevelson, Diane MacKown, 1976, 28:53
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRTLKcwE2ik

Excerpt from the Dale Schierholt film, Nevelson: Awareness in the Fourth Dimension. 6:17
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV4NM0GaVgo&feature=related

Pace's Arne Glimcher on Louise Nevelson's "Sky Cathedral - Moon Garden + One" (1957-1960), 3:30
A video by ARTINFO and Streeter Phillips
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj9MwUr4Jd8&feature=related