Keeping House with Louise Nevelson by Julia Bryan-Wilson
October 14, 2019
This article examines how Louise Nevelson’s Dream House sculptures (1972-1973) simultaneously produced and disrupted notions of domesticity. As a series of alternative or non-normative dwellings, the Dream Houses are spaces that indicate a broader potential to reinvent the home. Nevelson’s wooden, allblack Dream House sculptures reconfigure our understanding of gendered domestic work - that is, the tending to physical space and matter around us, as well as the affective claims we make about our familiars, not least, claims Bryan-Wilson, queer or otherwise expansive forms of kinship around gender, sexuality, and race.
This article references the debates in the 1967 panel, to differentiate Nevelson’s idealization around ‘black’ from those of her peers.