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 valiant work across mediums, was celebrated last night with her acceptance of the National Arts Club‘s Medal of Honor, joining Faith Ringgold, Lois Dodd, Joseph Kosuth, Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, and Roy Lichtenstein, who have previously been awarded for their exceptional contributions to the field of fine arts.

“I’m so grateful and fortunate to have this time to still keep learning, to still keep showing, to be collected, to still be relevant and influential after all these years. And I’ve lived long enough and worked long enough to not feel like an imposter,” Grossman said last night, winning applause and cheers from the adoring audience during a dinner, prepared by Executive Chef Lynn Bound, at the club in the Tilden Mansion in New York’s charming Gramercy Park.

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

Born in New York City in 1940, Grossman moved with her family to a farm in Oneonta, New York, at age five. At 16, Grossman joined her parents, working in the garment industry as a “dart and gusset girl,” which inspired her pioneering and innovative utilization of leather, zippers, dyes, pattern making, and sewing in her always-evolving oeuvre. Grossman was peripherally associated with New York’s prevailing Abstract Expressionism art scene, socializing in the 1960s at the Cedar Tavern and Max’s Kansas City. She met her longtime mentor and friend, Richard Lindner, while earning her BFA at Pratt Institute, experimenting in lithography, woodcuts, drawing, and painting, which helped to establish the foundation of her groundbreaking practice.

Grossman returned to New York after visiting Europe in 1962 on Pratt’s Ida C. Haskell Award for Foreign Travel, and staged her first solo exhibition at age 23, at New York’s Krasner Gallery of collages, constructions, drawings, and paintings. Quickly taking the art world by storm, Grossman’s 1964 move into a vast studio in Chinatown’s Eldridge Street, where she worked for 35 years, enabled her to create on a larger scale. Grossman first exhibited her life-size leather covered heads – a body of work that she pursued through 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, wildly self aware, and darkly comedic, Grossman earned laughs from last night’s audience, citing her “trials and tribulations” and referencing her 2012 50-year retrospective at the Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York: Nancy Grossman: Tough Life Diary.

“It was a great honor and privilege to celebrate Nancy Grossman as she received the prestigious National Arts Club Medal of Honor. Listening to the insightful presentations by both Ian Berry, Director of the Tang Museum at Skidmore College and Connie Butler, Director of PS1-MoMA, I was reminded of Nancy’s greatness: in her work, she has furthered our understanding of desire, power, truth, and beauty. A true visionary that has never compromised her craft, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is so very honored to be her representative but most importantly, her friend,” said halley k harrisburg, Director, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, which has represented Grossman since 1997.

Grossman was honored alongside an exhibition titled Members, showcasing works by women artists that correlate to Grossman’s commentary of gender ambiguity, contradiction, and sensuality, which is on view at The National Arts Club (NAC) until June 28.

“We are humbled by this opportunity to celebrate the brilliant career of Nancy Grossman,” said Scott Drevnig, Executive Director of the NAC. “Her career spans over fifty years, but her extraordinary work has only grown in intensity and relevance. As a beacon of arts and culture for the last 125 years, the National Arts Club is thrilled to continue pursuing our mission to stimulate and foster public interest in the arts by recognizing extraordinary artists and thinkers like Nancy.”