Sky Cathedral

Louise Nevelson, 1958 · Gallery 402 · Floor 4

Okay, so it’s the middle of the night in Kips Bay, Manhattan. A woman pushing sixty is going through what the neighbors left on the curb. Her block’s being torn down, so the sidewalk’s basically… a free yard sale. Chair legs. Banisters. Lettuce crates. Milk boxes. Spindles. She hauls it all home. Her name is Louise Nevelson. So… for years, she and her son picked up wood off the street to burn in the fireplace. Some of that wood still had nails in it. Nail holes, too. So she stopped burning it and just nailed it all together. And she knew. This was art. Then she did what any decent thief does with the score. Painted it all one color. Flat black. Her first wall. Nearly sixty boxes, stacked over eleven feet high. She calls it Sky Cathedral. Have a look. A chair leg and a stair rail and a crate slat are the same stuff now. You couldn’t pick your own furniture out of this lineup. She said she hadn’t chosen black. “It chose me.” So… when she first showed this, the gallery walls were painted dark, and the lights were turned down to a dim blue, and people kept bumping into things. A critic called her sculptures “appalling and marvelous.” Even Life magazine ran a story. Now, the museum wanted the wall. But it didn’t have the money to buy it. So it came in as a gift from Mr. and Mrs. Ben Mildwoff. Who are they? Turns out Mrs. Mildwoff was her… sister.

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