Born in New York City, Nancy Grossman grew up on a working farm in Oneonta, New York. Life on a farm with parents in the garment industry would shape Grossman’s artistic visions and strongly influence her choice of materials, which frequently include fabric and leather. Grossman studied at Pratt Institute with Richard Lindner, receiving her BFA in 1962. Immediately, she began receiving grants and awards such as Pratt’s Ida C. Haskell Award for Foreign Travel (1962) and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1965-66). The accolades have continued throughout her career and include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1984), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (1991), a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (1996-97), and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2001).
Grossman became famous in the 1960s for her sculptures of heads carefully carved from the soft wood of discarded telephone poles, overlaid with leather and adorned with zippers, glass eyes, enamel noses, spikes and straps. The size, shape and facial features of Grossman’s heads evoke masculinity, but Grossman refers to them as self-portraits, implying the instability of gender identity but also demonstrating how all artwork offers us at least a glimpse of the artist.
Since she began making art in the 1950s, Grossman has steadily explored collage, sculpture and assemblage. Much of Grossman’s work concerns the physicality of the body but her works on paper consist of collaged words and fragments, scraps taken from her journals and placed into compositions that blend the chaotic elements of chance with the labor-intensive organizing hand of the artist.
In 1999, Grossman was forced to leave her studio on Chinatown’s Eldridge Street that she had occupied for thirty-five years, and she relocated to her current home of Brooklyn. Her work also struck out in new directions with a group of sculptural assemblages that seem to echo the archaeology and violence involved in the upheaval of her move.
