Art Review: Nancy Graves "Archaea"
Locks Gallery, February 7 – March 28, 2026
There are four sculptures in the show. Three of them are floor pieces. They are whimsical while being weighty, they are improvisational while requiring equipment and assistance. They are patinated and painted with abandon. The fourth piece, Wax Works VI, is different. It is smaller and sits on a pedestal. Instead of paint and patina, the conglomeration of bones coalesces into a spiny creature shining in a coat of fired enamel in hues of blues, greens, and reds. Of the four sculptures it has become my favorite. It captures more of the ineffable that the other three pieces only sketch.
The exhibition also includes four paintings. Three are on black grounds and are from the same 1980s period as the sculptures. One painting, Simula, on a white ground, is from the 1970s. They are layered with patterns that can be read flattened or spatially. Evolute includes a pointillist portrait of Nefertiti that floats among less recognizable markings and patterns. Knowing that Graves was interested in how things are measured and mapped, these markings could be biological, seismic, or astral in origin. They play with space, time, and perceptions of depth, and how we read information and glean knowledge.
I have complicated feelings about this show, which I’m grateful for. How often do we see exhibitions that perplex and prod us into thinking about them after we return the checklist to the desk? One aspect of the complication is that I am writing about someone who is no longer around showing at a gallery that doesn’t need press when there are so many artists and exhibition spaces in Philadelphia and New York who could use the focus. My impulse to write about Nancy Graves came from something a collector in Miami mentioned to me about a Graves painting he owns. He told me that “she had a reputation as being difficult.” I was slightly familiar with Graves’s work in February when I toured the collection in Miami. I hadn’t realized she painted. I knew her wonderful camels and the scattered bone pieces, and I had a vague recollection of seeing some metal works. I also knew the artworld lore: Graves had been married to the sculptor Richard Serra early on. The collector’s comment made me bristle. As a sculptor myself who studied under and alongside guys who weld, I felt a sense of sorority and a need to question whether she was actually “difficult” or if that was just the usual rusty label applied to confident, assertive women.
When I returned from Florida it was a nice coincidence to find that a show of Graves’s work had recently opened at the Locks Gallery. This brings me to a second aspect of my complication in writing about the show: I didn’t like the work. But I wanted to. From what I’d read about Graves, I liked her.
She had an impressive life and career that was cut short. She died from ovarian cancer in 1995 at the age of 54. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Vassar in English, then went on to study at Yale where she received another bachelor’s degree and an MFA in art, then a Fulbright grant to study painting in Paris. Her Yale cohort included Brice Marden, Chuck Close, and Richard Serra. She and Serra were married for six years. Later she was married to veterinarian Dr. Avery L. Smith from 1991 until her death. I was tickled to read that the artist who created those winsome life-size camels and provocative fields of bones ended up with a vet. An important part of her origin story is that her father worked for the Berkshire Museum, whose collection encompasses fine art and natural history, and where she is reported to have spent a lot of time. She traveled the world and made films and prints along with paintings and sculpture. There are lots of nice things written about her and her work. I didn’t find any record of her being difficult. From what I’d read, I liked her for her wide-ranging interests and experiments, her adventures and derring-do.
So, I was a little dismayed that my first impression of the exhibition at Locks was a kind of aesthetic revulsion. Gazing around at the four sculptures, the phrase “pretty metal vomit” came to mind. The organic shapes in the work reminded me of Prada’s “vomit” wallpaper by the design firm 2x4 from the early 2000s with its scattered flora and fauna cutouts. I also thought of Judy Pfaff’s exuberant, airy installation work and Elizabeth Murray’s colorful, cartoonish humor. Those are all referents that I enjoy. But the Graves assemblages disappointed me in a way I couldn’t articulate. Then Leo Steinberg’s essay, “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public” in Other Criteria came to mind. In it, he recounts how not only civilians but artists and critics can find certain artwork off-putting. Among his examples he cites Matisse’s dislike of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon when he first saw it. I decided to step forward and question my reaction to the work instead of turning around and leaving.
In thinking about the show and my reaction I realize now that what I had wanted to see was more camels. With those pieces, Graves had created a delightful verisimilitude that played with expectation and novelty; they were representational but assembled from a variety of materials. Camels are stately while also being inherently goofy-looking marvels of nature. But at the time of my visit to the Locks Gallery, I thought what is going on with these assemblages that look dated and dopey? Yet, they were undeniably compelling. I started taking notes.
On the right as you enter the exhibition space there is a drawing-in-space kind of sculpture that is roughly four feet high by almost six feet long that reads as a ship. Crowning the piece is a cast-iron curved object with two rows of slots — an old tractor seat — topped off with a hefty metal spiral ribbon curlicue. The piece is punningly titled Insight Out. The curved seat reminded me of the bicorn hat worn by Cap’n Crunch of cereal fame. Taking a closer look at the piece I noticed a number of dangling castings of carnivorous pitcher plant pods, complete with their caps. I have a dried pod of one and I know what fragile and fascinating vessels they are. These bronze versions are painted or patinated in colorful stripes and undulate along a kind of ship’s prow. A cast bronze starfish floats on the ship bottom above a zigzag yellow stand that supports the swooping keel painted with a pattern of circles that remind me of octopus suckers. An eye in a fragment of a face steadies the star. A leather belt dangles here, a cobbled-together hook anchors the piece in the back. Mesh painted pink is linear in one view and provides a patterned screen from another angle. Chain and rebar support and span from prow to stern, and the magic of welding or brazing creates a teetering tautness. It is comical chaos held in balance and changing from view to view.
I was still not totally on board aesthetically, but I was starting to think about how fun and hard the pieces would have been to make. And expensive. I worked in a bronze foundry, lasting for all of five months. It is a dirty, heavy, costly medium. Graves was casting many things that were ephemeral, like vegetation and pig guts, and quotidian, like rope and fans, and combining them with a variety of crafted and found metal elements. Whiffle Tree, (Pendula Series) sports a pumpkin-like orange armature in front of an oversized leaf. The gnarled root structure is a tangle of curved rain gutter elbow and rope as thick as your wrist. An offshoot from the root system is a cast bronze stalk of Brussels sprouts painted expressively in hues of bubblegum and jelly beans. I was beginning to see a conceptual relationship between the literalism of the camels and the cast elements she was combining in these metal assemblages. It seemed admirably improvisational and experimental. This was confirmed later when I read a profile in the New York Times that described the collaborative relationship between Dick Polich, who started Tallix Foundry in upstate New York, and Graves. The article captures it well:
‘’I need a man with a wheelbarrow,’‘ Miss Graves calls to Mr. Polich, having decided what pieces she’ll use. She loads up several incredibly heavy leaves, flowers, pods, palms, reeds, and Chinese vegetables - the makings of a bronze Eden - and follows the wheelbarrow to the base on which she and Mr. Polich are working. It resembles a beaver dam. Tentatively, she holds a long bronze bean up to a willowy branch. ‘’Wait a minute, Nance,’‘ says Mr. Polich, ‘’that might not work. I have to keep you out of trouble.’‘ The welder Denis Holmes, face covered in a plastic mask, steps in with a suggestion as to how the pieces can be joined. He is the one who will put the whole thing together.
According to the article, Graves would travel from her loft in Soho to the foundry on the Hudson River an average of twice a week carrying flora, fauna, and found materials to be cast in bronze. There, she would work with technicians to assemble and finish pieces. Later in the same piece, Polich reflects on working with Graves:
‘’I like to work with Nancy because she dares to see things new, and asks that we do the same. I admire her so much for coming here with ideas that are not complete - that require interaction on the floor. Most artists have to work alone. Her way takes a lot of courage.’‘
Now when I consider these works I still find them difficult to love but I think they are terrific attestations of an adventuring mind that asks us to question what we know and look for what we don’t know. As for Graves herself, I admire the way she balanced her sense of play with practicality and skill. I appreciate that she kept her work human-scaled and nature-centered. And she was prolific. She did indeed need a man with a wheelbarrow. Don’t we all.
Locks Gallery
600 Washington Square
Philadelphia, PA 19106
My first encounter with Nancy Graves was through her paintings—specifically her lyrical, color silkscreens from the late 1980s. I am just as puzzled as you are by this body of work. Reading your reflection on these pieces led me to think that it is not the artist who is difficult, as her "reputation" might suggest, but the work itself. If difficult means that the work challenges, questions, and intrigues the viewer, then perhaps difficulty is something to be celebrated.
Great review Sharon. I like going along with you while you work through reactions and thoughts. I have never been overly attracted to Graves’s work either, but share your respect. Your writing makes me think that liking an artist based on how they operate in the world or make art is even more vulnerable to time and changing taste than liking their work.