Louise Nevelson and I are twins, separated at birth by almost one hundred years—or maybe we’re friends, or she’s my godparent: a guiding light, a warning, an inspiration. Nevelson is an artist whose life and work have been critical to my own formation. Like Nevelson, I ran to New York City and felt the undeniable click of belonging. The tight grid of the city is the organizing principle of my life. Its repetition, its containment, its right angles—these are the conditions I rely on.
We were both born in mid-coast Maine. I read that she hated Rockland. To her, it reflected a life that was provincial, fixed, too small for her ambition. I know that feeling. I once watched an archival interview she gave upon her triumphant return to Maine, when she was invited to propose a sculpture for a public site. She finally settled on the little plot of grass in front of the Rockland Public Library. When asked why, she said, “I guess I’ll do it here, because the other sites are ugly. They’re ugly and they stink.” That line made me laugh, but also, I understood its defiance. A woman choosing where, and how, to be seen. When she arrived in New York City, she was dazzled by what she saw reflected there—the entropy and reinvention of its latticed streets and architecture. She called the city “a great big sculpture.”
I had a chaotic, and difficult, childhood. Lots of love, but also grief and uncertainty. This was surrounded by a wild and winding landscape. Out of desperation, my mother moved us from the rocky coast of Maine to the equally remote, dusty, red mountains of New Mexico. There, the vastness felt directionless. I craved structure, a language to hold things still.
Nevelson needed structure too. She built that structure in the form of towering, monochrome walls of scavenged wood. Fragments of a messy world forced into order. A woman making her own container.
There is almost no distinction between her best-known sculpture, the walls of wood she began making in the 1950s, and the buildings on the gridded city blocks. It’s the grid that I rely on in my work too. A grid is not just a compositional strategy; it’s therapy. Making clean and simple things from a mess. Imposing logic on unruly scraps. The most precious time I have in the studio, almost devotional, is the practice of placing fragments together and feeling the alignment of a new form emerge.
Nevelson didn’t arrive in New York fully formed. Before the confidence of her iconic, grand, monochromatic walls, there was a young woman searching. In the 1930s and ’40s, Nevelson studied figure drawing at the Art Students League, while also absorbing modern dance, particularly the choreography of Martha Graham.
Louise Nevelson, Four Figures, circa 1930. Collection of the Farnsworth Art Museum © 2025. Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
She learned the body, its lines, gestures, contradictions. If you’re tight and inhibited, life drawing grounds you directly in the moment, and dance is a release. Both practices are a path toward feeling free. That kind of learning—the body, the spirit—was the groundwork for her life as an artist, and for the personal ruptures she would navigate. She initiated her divorce in 1941, a rare act for a woman then, allowing her child to be cared for primarily by trusted relatives.
Nevelson’s early drawings, like Four Figures (ca. 1930), depict figures that are solid and weighty, even when rendered in ink. You can see her probing the edge between drawing and object, playing with the potentials of two dimensions in ways that fed into her three-dimensional work. Her early sculptures, small and rough figures, made from materials culturally coded as masculine (stone, bronze, clay), feel like secret ancestors to her more recognized work. They’re clunky, intimate, and a little wild, forms that resist polish and proclaim presence. I return to them often.
She began her studies at the Art Students League in the late 1920s—beaming her ambition out and away from the domestic sphere, frustrating her husband. That friction between her vocation and the expectations of women at that time is discernible in her work from this period. It’s there in the gesture of her 1938 sculpture Dancer, a figure with cubed legs, angular shoulders, and a small head. Full of movement and weight. The proportions are exaggerated and deliberate. They privilege expression and composition over conventional beauty, favoring bold shapes over familiar ones. Such visual disruptions challenge rote standards of beauty, revealing a uniquely feminine and intimate viewpoint.
Nevelson’s sculpture Mother and Child (1948) powerfully foreshadows her movement toward total abstraction. A few loosely drawn, sgraffito gestures on the blocky shape indicate the facial features and underscore that this minimal object is also depicting figures. The sculptures from this series play between sculpture and drawing and abstraction and figuration. Here, defined by a few etched lines on the wet clay, Nevelson’s figures embody the complexity of the relationship between a mother and her child. The dark form holds together as a single whole, yet the faces emerge apart, each on its own protrusion. That separation introduces a quiet loneliness, and the delicacy of their connection reveals something tender and vulnerable. That feeling of vulnerability arises from an awareness of the impermanence of that connection; Mother and child are at once together and alone. It feels as though, in making this sculpture, Nevelson considered both the care that defines maternal bonds and also how time necessitates separation.
Paring the figure down to its most essential shapes is both a guiding principle and an ongoing challenge in my work. When the figure is reduced to its barest form, this opens a space for connection that feels universal, reaching across boundaries. I often push the body toward odd or exaggerated scales—these distortions feel like both a refusal of prescriptive norms and an embrace of individuality, a protest and also a gesture of care. Big, curved shoulders, small heads, strange eyes, breasts shaped like perfect circles, or long ones like chalices.
Installation view of Ruby Sky Stiler’s Long Pose at Alexander Gray Associates, 2025.
Nevelson’s early years matter not only for what they predict but for what they reveal—vulnerability, experimentation, searching. She was forty-five, my age now, when she began the work that defined her. Looking at the evolution of her sculptures from where I stand today, a century later, I don’t see the early sculptures as fixed, or secondary, but as evolving forms that bridge time. As her practice progressed, figuration receded, giving way to new experiments, yet her sensibility remained consistent. Monochromatic surfaces, reductive geometry, and tensions between two-and-three dimensionality were always present. Somehow, discovering this continuity within the oddball, early sculptures reminds me that forms evolve, are inherited, passed along, unfinished, connected.
There’s something in all of this about mortality. My daughter is in the bright morning of her life—her funny drawings and little characters keep finding their way into my paintings, giving them energy. She wanders into my studio, finds the paper that I use to transfer drawings into paint, and doodles for an hour. Those sketches are caught in my net. My mother is in her twilight, still living out in the Wild West. In my earliest and sweetest memories of my mom, she’s seated on the couch with her colored pencils, drawing sinewy abstractions of trees, mountains, and spirits. I’m between them, holding both, and together we form an unbroken line.
I’m never satisfied with my work. It frustrates me; I feel restless; it’s never right. When I pull back and experience my work on a continuum that connects me to the artists who came before me and the artists who will come after me, this helps me tolerate that discomfort. When I make a shape that feels connected to another artist, I bring that artist to life; I update their story, like an arrow through time.
Ruby Sky Stiler, Mother holding Child, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York, © 2025 Ruby Sky Stiler.
When I bring scraps and fragments into alignment and something new emerges, I’m carrying Nevelson’s story forward. When a simple shape slips into unconventional figuration, I’m extending her lineage. Her vision shaped my own ethic of fragmentation, of reclamation and repair.
Recently my daughter asked, “Why is Mom always talking about Louise Nevelson?” It’s difficult to explain this obsession to my kids—they’ve been contained by safety and structure all their lives. Beyond the work, Nevelson is a source of courage I tap into for strength. A reminder that taking up space doesn’t require certainty—it requires persistence. She lived in near poverty for decades. She scavenged wood from the streets to make her work, partly out of necessity. She struggled, she was durable, she was vulnerable, she faced innumerable, tangible challenges; she was unapologetic. I understand the stakes of building a life around your work. My work is central to my survival, and as I pass the threshold she passed as she transitioned from her “early work” to everything else, I am steadied by her endurance.
