Revolutionary Master Nancy Grossman Awarded National Arts Club’s Medal Of Honor

Nancy Grossman, who continues to transform and confound the global art world with her singular and courageous work across media, was celebrated last night with her acceptance of the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, joining Faith Ringgold, Lois Dodd, Joseph Kosuth, Louise Nevelson. , Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha and Roy Lichtenstein, who have previously been honored for their outstanding contributions to the field of fine art.

“I'm very grateful and blessed to have this time to keep learning, to keep showing, to be picked up, to keep being relevant and influential after all these years. And I've lived long enough and worked long enough not to feel like an impostor,” Grossman said last night, earning cheers and applause from the adoring audience at a dinner prepared by executive chef Lynn Bound , at the Tilden Mansion Club. in New York's lovely Gramercy Park.

For six decades, Grossman has blazed a fierce and often misunderstood path to the mastery of sculpture, drawing, painting, printmaking, collage and assemblage, grappling with painful and visceral narratives that annihilate and eviscerate conventional notions. of femininity, power and brutality.

Born in New York City in 1940, Grossman moved with his family to a farm in Oneonta, New York, at the age of five. At the age of 16, Grossman joined her parents, working in the garment industry as a “dart and dart girl”, which inspired her innovative and pioneering use of leather, zippers, dyes, patterning and sewing in his work in constant evolution. Grossman became peripherally associated with New York's predominant Abstract Expressionist art scene, socializing in the 1960s at the Cedar Tavern and Max's Kansas City. He met his mentor and longtime friend, Richard Lindner, while earning his BFA at Pratt Institute, experimenting in lithography, woodcut, drawing, and painting, which helped lay the foundation for his innovative practice.

Grossman returned to New York after visiting Europe in 1962 with Pratt's Ida C. Haskell Award for Foreign Travel, and held his first solo exhibition at the age of 23 at New York's Krasner Gallery of collages, constructions, drawings and paintings. In 1964, Grossman's move to a large studio on Eldridge Street in Chinatown, where he worked for 35 years, allowed him to create on a grand scale. Grossman first exhibited her life-size leather-covered heads, a work she continued until the mid-1990s and for which she is often most easily identified, in a 1969 solo exhibition at Cordier and Ekstrom Gallery in New York.

Irreverent, self-aware and darkly comic, Grossman drew laughs from last night's audience, citing his “trials and tribulations” and referencing his 2012 50-year retrospective at the Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York: Nancy Grossman: Diary of a Hard Life.

“It was a great honor and privilege to celebrate Nancy Grossman as she received the National Arts Club's prestigious Medal of Honor. Hearing insightful presentations from Ian Berry, Director of the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, and Connie Butler, Director of PS1 -MoMA reminded me of Nancy's greatness: in her work, she has enhanced our understanding of desire, power and truth.A true visionary who has never compromised her craft, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is very honored to be his representative, but most importantly, his friend,” said Halley K Harrisburg, director of the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, which has repped Grossman since 1997.

Grossman was honored along with an exhibition titled membersfeaturing works by women artists that engage with Grossman's commentary on gender ambiguity, contradiction, and sensuality, on view at The National Arts Club (NAC) through June 28.

“We are honored by this opportunity to celebrate Nancy Grossman's brilliant career,” said Scott Drevnig, NAC executive director. “His career spans more than fifty years, but his extraordinary work has only grown in intensity and relevance. As a beacon of arts and culture for the past 125 years, the National Arts Club is delighted to continue our mission to stimulate and foster public interest in the arts by recognizing extraordinary artists and thinkers like Nancy “.