Louise Nevelson

Dawn's Wedding Chapel II
1959

Intricate white architectural sculpture resembling a complex, abstract cityscape contained within a large, upright rectangular frame.

One of the foremost American sculptors of the twentieth century, Louise Nevelson is renowned for her large, monochromatic wood sculptures. Her largest works, or “environments,” as they are often called, are assemblages consisting of hundreds of boxes filled with objects scavenged from the streets of New York City, and painted a uniform color (white, gold, or, most commonly, black). Dawn’s Wedding Chapel II includes elements from one such environment, titled Dawn’s Wedding Feast, an installation of Nevelson’s first white sculptures, which she created for a 1959 exhibition. The work was, in Nevelson’s words, “a white wedding cake, a wedding mirror. . .a pillow. . .a kind of fulfillment, a transition to marriage with the world.” After the exhibition closed, she reassembled individual elements to form several discrete sculptures, of which Dawn’s Wedding Chapel II is but one example.

Not on view

Date
1959

Classification
Sculpture

Medium
Painted wood

Dimensions
Overall (Including base): 115 7/8 × 83 1/2 × 10 1/2in. (294.3 × 212.1 × 26.7 cm) Base: 6 × 83 1/2 × 10 1/2in. (15.2 × 212.1 × 26.7 cm)

Accession number
70.68a-m

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Howard and Jean Lipman Foundation, Inc.

Rights and reproductions
© Estate of Louise Nevelson/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

API
artworks/2026

Audio

Louise Nevelson, Dawn’s Wedding Chapel II, 1959

In America Is Hard to See

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Louise Nevelson, Dawn’s Wedding Chapel II, 1959

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Narrator: In this large wood sculpture made of found objects painted white, Louise Nevelson has transformed prosaic materials into an evocative shrine. The artist filled stacked compartments with discarded items she found on the streets—scraps of wood, parts of furniture, ornate architectural moldings, and banister railings. Nevelson had an intuitive approach to making art, perhaps influenced by her early training in modern dance. Here, she created a rhythmic composition through her use of light and shadow, and juxtapositions of different shapes and textures.
This work was originally part of a larger installation called Dawn’s Wedding Feast, which Nevelson created for an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1959. The work consisted of hundreds of stacked boxes and wooden forms—all painted white. Prior to this exhibition, her sculptures had almost always been black. Nevelson described her new installation as “a white wedding cake, a wedding mirror. . .a pillow. . .a kind of fulfillment, a transition to a marriage with the world.” After the exhibition closed, the artist dismantled the installation and reshuffled the individual boxes to form new discrete sculptures like this one—creating a miniature world of geometry and magic.