Pleistocene+Skeleton

Date: 1970
 * [[image:https://s3.amazonaws.com/saam.media/files/styles/x_large/s3/images/2005/2005.8A-E_1a.jpg?itok=Vg4gXIu5 width="316" height="201" link="@https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/pleistocene-skeleton-74830"]] || Title: **Pleistocene Skeleton**

Artist: **Nancy Graves**  Born: Pittsfield, Massachusetts 1940 Died: New York, New York 1995

Medium: steel, wax, marble dust and acrylic Dimensions: 84 x 120 x 36 in. (213.4 x 304.8 x 91.4 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment© 1970, The Nancy Graves Foundation

Accession: 2005.8A-E || Graves spent many hours of her childhood in a museum of art and natural history in the Berkshires where her father worked. In Florence in the late 1960s, surrounded by centuries of tradition and "trying to come up with something," Graves discovered wax anatomical models made by the eighteenth-century artist Clemente Susini. She began to create her own anatomical models of the bones, skin, and fur of camels, playing with viewers' perceptions of what is natural and what is invented. //Pleistocene Skeleton// is a distant echo of the real thing, an artwork based on fossilized forms, remnants of the living creature. The shapes and surfaces of the "bones"—steel armatures covered with sculpting material and painted—are as expressive as the brushstrokes of an abstract painting.
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//Pleistocene Skeleton// plays with perceptions of what is natural and what is invented. Nancy Graves sculpted this deceptively realistic skeleton based on the internal structure of a camel. Graves's abiding fascination with these unique creatures (and nature more generally) began during her childhood visits to the local natural history museum where her father worked. In later years, Graves traveled to North Africa where she observed and filmed herds of camels.

  
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