Calibrate:
hard and softground etching, aquatint, engraving
29.5 h x 32.5 w inches.
Signed, dated and numbered to lower edge ‘19/30 N.S. Graves '81’. This work is number 19 from the edition of 30 published by Tyler Graphics, Ltd., Mount Kisco, New York.
Ruis:
lithograph, etching, aquatint, engraving and pochoir with pastel on paper
31.5 h x 25.5 w inches.
Signed, dated and numbered to lower edge ‘AP 6/10 N.S. Graves '77’. This work is number 6 from 10 artist's proofs apart from the numbered edition of 33 published by Tyler Graphics, Ltd., Mount Kisco, New York.
provenance: James W. Hyams Collection
exhibited: Collecting Prints: Selections from the Collection of James W. Hyams, 2016, Piedmont Arts, Martinsville, Virginia
literature: Tyler 210:NG9 and 207:NG6
The James W. Hyams Collection
James W. Hyams started collecting art in 1967 when he was a student in college. The first work Hyams purchased—Vegetable Soup Can from Campbell’s Soup I by Andy Warhol—was paid for in installments and hung in his dorm room. A few years later, he purchased his second work by Warhol and from there collecting became a way of life.
Over the years, Hyams has amassed a stunning collection of prints from 1960s to the present day. From Warhol to Hirst, or Lichtenstein to Doig, his collection is about as contemporary as it gets. Focusing on works that he likes by influential artists, his collection of more than 400 prints is an exceptional survey of the most important art movements of the second half of the 20th century and the start of the 21st century.
Generous with his collection, Hyams has loaned many works to galleries and universities, sharing his collection with a public audience. Further, his pieces are proudly on display in his home, his acclaimed interior widely published.
I don't buy pieces that I don't like. But I do have a purpose in my collection. I am interested in buying key artists from the period.
James W. Hyams
Nancy Graves 1940–1995
Nancy Graves was an internationally renowned multidisciplinary artist whose oeuvre incorporated sculpture, painting, drawing, watercolor, prints, the production of avant-garde films, and set designs. Graves was born in Massachusetts and attended Vassar College followed by Yale University, where she earned her MFA in painting alongside classmates such as Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Chuck Close, and Richard Serra (to whom she was married from 1964 until 1970). In 1969, she was the youngest artist, and only the fifth woman, to be selected for a solo show at the Whitney Museum of Art. This launched her career to great heights and went on to be featured in hundreds of museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide in addition to receiving large-scale site-specific sculpture commissions.
Working from what Graves described as an “objective” point of view, she transformed maps, diagrams, and other scientific sources, into artworks, and initially rose to prominence in the late 1960s with post-Minimalist sculptures that referenced archaeological sites, anthropology and natural science displays. In the 1970s, she created abstract pointillist paintings of nature photographs, NASA satellite recordings, and Lunar maps, before returning to sculpture in the latter part of the decade. Graves was one of the first contemporary artists to experiment with casting bronze and helped revive the lost wax technique with her assemblies of cast found objects in bright colors and patinas.
In the 1980s, Graves expanded her artistic horizons, gaining recognition for large, open-form sculpture commissions and growing her drawing, painting, and printmaking practices. She also made monumental wall-mounted works incorporating high-relief sculptural elements, which cast patterned shadows on the painting and walls. In the last years of her career she further pushed the boundaries of casting, using glass, resin, paper, aluminum, and bronze, in elaborate reinterpretations of her own earlier creations, effectively applying an almost archaeological approach to her own oeuvre.
A pioneering artist, Graves left behind a visually complex and multivalent body of work, with examples being held in many public collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.. Her legacy lives on in the Nancy Graves Foundation, which was established in 1996 and gives grants to individual artists, maintains an archive of her life and work, and organizes exhibitions of her art.
