The World Outside

"Through the voices of scholars, contemporary artists, family, and carefully selected artworks, a more nuanced picture of Louise Nevelson emerges in The World Outside: Louise Nevelson at Midcentury. A deep dive into the artist's beginnings with modern dance and her subsequent immersion in avant-garde theatrical trends brings new understandings of her drawings and sculptures. A reframing of Nevelson's travels to Mexico and Guatemala in 1950 and 1951, respectively, and her encounters with pre-Columbian art reveal for the first time how colonial archeology haunted her visual language for decades. Another previously undiscussed facet of Nevelson's life, her folk-art interests, provides a topic rife for understanding the artist's approach to America's material culture of the past. A pioneering examination of Nevelson's printmaking experiences at Tamarind Lithography Workshop reveals how the artist created alternative modes of viewing through unconventional methods and materials. Also discussed anew is Nevelson's stated intention of creating the "in-between," examined here as an endemic and connecting core principle of her work. A fresh look recontextualizes Nevelson's experiences during the rise of environmentalism and relays previously undisclosed connections between her art and the ecology movement. And finally, in the five "reflection essays" contemporary voices from the dance and art worlds describe Nevelson's vaunted role in their careers; a local expert discusses Nevelson's roots and relationship to Maine in vivid detail; and the artist's granddaughter shares intimate insights into Nevelson's thoughts on spirituality"--