Grossman: The Archaelogical Digs of Life

Challenging sculptures, assemblages, and collages by Nancy Grossman promise a dramatic and powerful counterpoint to the early spring schedule of exhibitions at the Greenville County Museum of Art.

Nancy Grossman: Loud Whispers will be on view from February 9 though April 8, 2001. Grossman will visit Greenville on February 22nd, when she will be interviewed on stage by Curator Martha R. Severens. The interview, set for 7:30 p.m. in the Museum Theatre, will be free and open to the public, but seating is limited.

Grossman is best known for her sensual and often brutal wooden sculptures of heads, wrapped in black leather skins and adorned with spikes, guns, zippers, and masks. Her collages and assemblages apply a sculptor's three-dimensional vision in a variety of fabrics, objects, and textures. Loud Whispers focuses primarily on these collages and assemblages, offering a thirty-year sampler by a sometimes mystical and often controversial artist.

Born in New York City in 1940, Nancy Grossman spent her earliest years in an upstate (NY) farmhouse, surrounded by an extended family of eight adults and sixteen children. Her parents had roots in the garment business; at the age of sixteen, Grossman worked as a "dart and gusset girl" in their dress factory. Soon after, she escaped the farm and returned to New York to study art. Her acquired skills in patterning, sewing, and piecing became the medium for her message.

Those who view Grossman's art look for messages in figures and heads that are often masked, bound, confined, and zippered. Black leather, nails, bits of paper, fabric, metal and wood form the detritus of our world, recaptured and reformed in totems, collages, and assemblages. Some, such as Black Lavascape (1994-95) are openly topical; Grossman created this matte black assemblage not long after a visit to the volcano fields of Hawaii. Ozymondias (1973), a mixed media assemblage, captures the regal loneliness of Shelley's fallen icon in wood, metal, fabric and paint.

Loud Whispers includes three of Grossman's leather-clad heads, H.U.F., (1980), Snarl (1988) and Tilt (1990), which offer a glimpse of the artist's better-known productions.

In an interview last fall with Lowery Stokes Simms of The Studio Museum in Harlem, Grossman said "collage exists within ourselves, responding to, reflecting noises, rhythms, in our work and objects. I realized that objects bring their own energy, and that things can make themselves like the archaeological digs of life."

Related events include the February 22nd appearance, an interview that will be conducted in the Museum Theatre. A catalogue of the exhibition will be available for sale in the Museum Shop.

The Greenville County Museum of Art is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. and on Sundays from 1 p.m. until 5 p.m. The Museum is closed on Mondays and major holidays, including Easter. For information, call 864-271-7570 email us.