Louise Nevelson once declared, “I see New York City as a great big sculpture.” The Whitney Museum’s latest exhibition, Collection View: Louise Nevelson, running through August 10, 2025, takes this sentiment to heart, presenting over fifteen of her sculptures against the backdrop of the city that inspired her. This focused presentation draws exclusively from the museum’s holdings, underscoring Nevelson’s enduring relationship with the Whitney, which organized her first retrospective in 1967 and now houses over ninety of her works.
Nevelson’s signature monochromatic assemblages—primarily painted black—transform discarded materials into unified, abstract compositions. By cloaking items like duck decoys and lettuce crates in a single hue, she erased their individual identities, allowing form and structure to take precedence. This exhibition reimagines the relationship between her work and New York, highlighting the dynamic interplay she sought to suggest between motion and stillness, light and shadow, dawn and dusk.
Nevelson’s shadow-drenched assemblages continue to echo through the work of today’s artists who grapple with space, identity, and the architectural presence of sculpture. Her fearless embrace of abstraction and commitment to a personal visual language—often forged from the remnants of urban life—laid the groundwork for generations of artists working across installation, feminist practice, and post-minimalism. You can see her influence in the sculptural strategies of artists like Rachel Harrison, Theaster Gates, and even Sarah Sze, who similarly treat materials not as objects but as elements of an emotional architecture. Nevelson proved that the monumental could also be intimate, and that a woman’s vision—built from scraps—could dominate the walls of major museums without apology or compromise.
Organized by Kim Conaty, Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, with Roxanne Smith and Antonia Pocock, the exhibition is part of the Whitney’s Outside the Box programming, supported by the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation. The curatorial approach emphasizes the theatricality inherent in Nevelson’s constructions, inviting viewers to engage with the works as immersive environments rather than static objects.
In Collection View: Louise Nevelson, the Whitney offers a compelling exploration of an artist who saw the city not just as a backdrop but as a collaborator in her creative process. Through this exhibition, Nevelson’s vision of New York as a “great big sculpture” is both honored and vividly realized.
