Louise Nevelson’s City on the High Mountain, sited just outside Storm King’s Museum Building, is a playful and complex assemblage of black-painted steel. Nevelson frequently combined elements from existing works to create new compositions, and City on the High Mountain was sourced from models for different sculptures she had created several years earlier. Conjoining the elements with large curvilinear shapes, she eventually enlarged a ten-foot model to the sculpture’s current height of more than twenty feet. Additional pieces added to create the final composition include the grill-like “lace,” which reminded the artist of lace doilies from her childhood, and a suspended gong-like element. Of the ball of railroad spikes, created several years earlier and placed at the very top, Nevelson noted, “Sometimes it’s only a period that really finishes the sentence, and that was the period that finished that sentence.” The entire assemblage is painted black, a signature color Nevelson used extensively for three decades. “In the academic world, they used to say black and white were no colors,” Nevelson observed, “but I’m twisting that to tell you that for me it is the total color. It means totality. It means: contains all.”

Nevelson’s distinctive sculptures reflect her rich and multifaceted career. Born in 1899 in Kyiv, Ukraine, she emigrated with her family to Rockland, Maine, in 1905, and she married and moved to New York in 1920. Hungry for new artistic experiences, she took classes at the Art Students League of New York and with the Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hoffmann in Munich. In 1933 she assisted Diego Rivera with his Portrait of America mural for the New Workers School in New York. By this time Nevelson had also embarked on a decades-long dedication to dance and modern movement techniques. Finally, after a 1941 one-woman gallery exhibition, Nevelson’s work began to receive notice. Her first experiments with weathering steel date from 1966; the material enabled her to work with new, large-scale forms, matching her vision for what her art could be and would become. During the 1970s, when Nevelson was in her seventies, commissions and demand for her monumentally scaled work expanded dramatically. She retained great ambition throughout her career. “Humans really are heir to every possibility within themselves, and it is only up to us to admit it and accept it,” Nevelson stated. “You see, you can buy the whole world and you are empty, but when you create the whole world, you are full.”