To reach the museum entrance, you walk through the Figge Conservatory. Formerly the home of Dale Chihuly's Red Chandelier, the conservatory now hold Dawn's Forest, a 12 piece, 90 feet long, 45 feet tall painted balsam and plywood "assemblage" by postwar American artist Louise Nevelson. This is Nevelson's largest, most complex, and last major work. It was commissioned in 1985 by the Georgia-Pacific Center in Atlanta. When it was acquired in 2010 it had never before been seen in a museum setting.
Nevelson (1899-1988) was one of the most innovative sculptors of the 20th century. She struggled for decades in near obscurity before becoming internationally famous in the 1960's. Nevelson was born in Kiev, Russia, and immigrated to the United States with her family in 1905, settling in Rockland, Maine, where her father owned a lumber yard. For a short period in 1933, Nevelson worked as an assistant to the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (who also has multiple works in the museum) who was in New York City creating his Rockefeller Center mural. Her first museum retrospective came at the Whitney Museum of Art in 1967.
