Ongoing Installation
Reopens October 14
Naples, FL
Dawn’s Forest is the last major work by Louise Nevelson, who lived from 1899 to 1988. It is her largest and most complicated environmental sculpture. The huge sculpture, which was made in the artist’s signature assemblage style, is made of white-painted abstract wood pieces. The work’s single color gives its different parts a sense of unity, and the white finish makes me think of the clean possibilities that each new day brings. The 25-foot-tall standing columns that look like trees and the vertical pieces that hang from the ceiling add to the forest-like atmosphere and let people walk under and through the “trees.”
Dawn’s Forest took Nevelson more than a year to finish. He was done with it in the spring of 1986. It is different from the other environmental sculptures she made because of its size and color. Most of her other big pieces were black. Dawn’s Forest was commissioned by Georgia-Pacific and MetLife. From 1986 to 2010, it was shown at the Georgia-Pacific Center in Atlanta. With a lot of help from Robert T. It was bought by The Baker Museum in 2010 from Terry Edwards, Barbara and Ron Balser, and Georgia-Pacific.
Nevelson was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1899. In 1905, he moved to the United States. She grew up in Rockland, Maine, and then moved to New York City, where she spent most of her life. Nevelson went to Munich to study art with Hans Hofmann after a short marriage and the birth of a son. In 1932, she moved back to New York and threw herself into her art.
Most people agree that Nevelson was one of the best American artists of the second half of the 20th century. She was one of the first artists to use installation art, but for many years she was almost unknown until she was in her 60s. ARTnews said in the late 1970s that Louise Nevelson’s name was probably better known than that of any other American artist.
With the long-term reinstallation of Dawn’s Forest in Hayes Hall, we bring attention to one of the most famous pieces in the permanent collection of The Baker Museum.
https://artisnaples.org/baker-museum/exhibitions/2021-22/dawns-forest
