Louise Nevelson and Shadows and Flags
In our new Design History Series we highlight iconic women in design history and their innovative work. The historic contributions of women to design are many, and we aim to increase the awareness of these contributions in order to counteract a general trend of underrepresentation. In this issue, in keeping with this month’s theme of public art, we celebrate American sculptor Louise Nevelson, hailed as the “grande dame of contemporary sculpture,” and her mammoth public art work Shadows and Flags.
New York, New York!
Louise Nevelson was born in Kyiv, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1899. Her family relocated to Rockland, Maine, in 1905, where her father managed a lumberyard. Growing up surrounded by scraps from the yard, Nevelson’s early fascination with sculpting emerged. By the age of ten, she had declared her ambition to become a professional sculptor.
In 1920, Nevelson married Charles Nevelson, a wealthy ship owner she would divorce in 1941, and moved to New York. In the city Nevelson encountered Cubism and collage, shaping her artistic sensibilities. Notably, she worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera on a mural project and as an art teacher for the Works Progress Administration, fostering her growth as an artist. Within the male-dominated postwar art scene of New York, Nevelson carved her niche, notable as a woman artist in a field dominated by men.
Though Nevelson held her first solo exhibition in 1941, it wasn’t until the late 1950s that she developed her signature style of monochromatic, spray-painted wooden assemblages. Her innovative approach involved arranging discarded wood pieces into abstract compositions, often forming sculptural walls and environments unified by a single color. While she became best known for these assemblages, which were featured in museums around the world, she was also prominent in the public art scene, crafting massive outdoor compositions in scrap metal that were oversized cousins to her already large cabinet-style works in wood.
Shadows and Flags
Nevelson was commissioned by the Public Arts Fund to create a site-specific public art work to revitalize a formerly empty lot. The result was Shadows and Flags, a series of monumental curved forms that appear to float and billow in the air like flags. The series included seven towering sculptures encasing columns ranging from 20 to 40 feet high. The sculptures were carefully proportioned to rise just above the surrounding buildings and were painted in Nevelson’s iconic black, which to her signified the sum of all colors and the potential of all experience. Nevelson created the sculptures from salvaged scrap metal and old machine parts, and was raised on a crane to assemble the sculptures in mid-air.
Shadows and Flags, designed when Nevelson was in her 70s, was her last major public art work. Installed in 1977 within the Financial District’s Legion Memorial Square at 10 Liberty Street, the plaza was transformed into Louise Nevelson Plaza the following year, marking the first time such an honor was bestowed upon a female artist in New York City.
Adversity and Redesign
As the Louise Nevelson Plaza is not far from the World Trade Center, it underwent significant alterations after the disastrous events of 9/11, reflecting broader security concerns in the area. The addition of security measures, including a guard booth and bench rearrangements, reshaped the plaza’s layout and, as a result, the layout of Shadows and Flags.
The plaza underwent further revisions in 2007, when one of the sculptures fell victim to a truck collision and had to be permanently removed. Today, six sculptures remain, though all but the largest have been moved from their intended positions, as have benches and other environmental details that were originally determined by Nevelson, dismantling the artist’s vision of the space.
In 2009, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation collaborated with the Department of Transportation (DOT) and other firms to revitalize the neighborhood around the plaza, enhancing both the look and the functionality to the community. Though the plaza is a celebrated public space in the city, it is unclear how dramatically misaligned it might be from Nevelson’s vision, which was never fully documented.
The story of Shadows and Flags highlights the impermanence of public art, and the importance of the artist’s oversight as well as careful record-keeping in public art projects. The project is a partly cautionary tale, underscoring the ongoing struggle to uphold artists’ legacies—even incredibly famous and well-respected artists—in ever-changing urban landscapes.
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