Nancy Graves

(b Pittsfield, MA, 23 Dec 1940).

American conceptual artist. While studying English literature at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, she received a fellowship in painting to the Yale-Norfolk Summer School. From 1961 to 1964 she studied fine art at Yale University, New Haven, CT, and in 1964 received a Fulbright-Hayes grant in painting to study in Paris. In 1966 she moved to New York, where she established a studio. Her first solo exhibition was in 1968 at the Graham Gallery, and later she became the first woman artist to have a solo retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work is founded on 20th-century conceptual discourses on art and draws on a wide range of sciences, including anatomy, palaeontology, anthropology, computer mapping, psychology and perception. Her curiosity for many subjects has been a consistent feature in works that include drawings, paintings, installations, sculptures and film. She is renowned for her first figurative pieces, for example Camel VIII, Camel VI and Camel VII (1969; all Ottawa, N.G.). These life-size, highly defined, handmade sculptures of wood, steel, burlap, polyurethane, skin, wax and oil, placed casually as if striding across the gallery floor, appear more camel-like than real camels and draw attention to perceptual problems of illusion and reality as well as to questions regarding the status and context of objects. In these and later figurative and non-figurative works (examples of which are held in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne, the Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, and the Neue Galerie, Aachen), Graves has been open in her approach and exploration of the artistic process and conceptual boundaries in art. She lives and works in New York. (Source: No author, "Nancy Graves," The Grove Dictionary of Art Online (Oxford University Press, Accessed June 16, 2004) )