The President, The Board of Governors, and The Fine Arts Committee of the National Arts Club cordially invite you to The Medal of Honor for Achievement in Fine Arts Honoring Nancy Grossman.
Nancy Grossman (b. 1940) studied painting under Richard Linder at Pratt Institute, earning her BFA in 1962. That same year, Krasner Gallery mounted her first solo exhibition and in 1963, she won a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Grossman’s work of the early to mid-1960s consists of collages, expressive figurative drawings and paintings, and a body of assemblage reliefs that integrate found leather, metal and wood. In 1968 she completed the first of her iconic leather head sculptures, a series she would expand over the next twenty-five years that embodies the thematic throughlines of her art: an embrace of gender ambiguity, an interest in formal contradiction and conflict, an audacious use of leather, and a rich sensuality. Throughout her career, Grossman has explored the mediums of drawing, collage and assemblage with works that express themes of repression, psychological turmoil and the animalistic aspects of human nature. Her work has been the subject of two major museum exhibitions in recent decades: Nancy Grossman: Heads at MoMA PS1 and Nancy Grossman: Tough Life Diary, a five-decade survey curated by Ian Berry at Skidmore College, which was accompanied by a comprehensive monograph.Grossman has received a steady flow of accolades throughout her career including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1984), a National Academician Award from the National Academy Museum (1994), a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (1996-97) and a Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award (2008). Grossman’s work is in numerous museum collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; The Israel Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC has represented Nancy Grossman since 1997.
Image: Nancy Grossman in Her Studio, Brooklyn, NY, 2024; Grace Roselli, Pandora’s BoxXProject
