Sky Cathedral/Southern Mountain, 1959

Louise Nevelson began making her signature wall sculptures in 1958, assembling stacked boxes and crates filled with found objects—including wall moldings, furniture legs, staircase balusters, bowling pins, chair slats, and wood—all painted in a monochromatic black. Nevelson referred to her assemblages as “environments,” drawing inspiration from the towering skyscrapers that surrounded her in New York, as well as the intimately scaled architecture of domestic spaces designed to support the human body. The uniform color of Sky Cathedral/Southern Mountain heightens the textures and patterns of the assembled objects, recalling the dynamic actions and forms of Abstract Expressionism as well as the sharp geometries of Cubism. The arched arrangement may also evoke the shape of an altar, shrine, or place of devotion. As the artist wrote, her work sought to find “the in-between places, the dawns and dusk, the objective world, the heavenly spheres, the places between the land and the sea.”