Translations:Leah Berliawsky Sadie/3/en

Biography

Nevelson was born on September 23, 1899, in Kiev, a territory that at the time belonged to the Russian Empire and today is the capital of Ukraine. In 1905, she emigrated to the United States with her family, settling in Rockland, Maine. Due to the little integration seen in the area where she lived as a child and teenager and to the conservative norms of the place, she decided to move to New York to study singing, drama, painting, and drawing. In 1920, she met Charles Nevelson, owner of a Jewish cargo ship, with whom she married and from whom she took her last name. From the union was born Myron Nevelson, the couple’s only son. Her relationship with her husband was fraught, since he forbade her to devote herself to art, which led to their separation in 1931.The artist entrusted her mother with the care of her son and continued her studies. She participated in numerous art syndicates including Artists Equity, the National Association of Women Artists, and American Abstract Artists. After a long artistic career with difficult beginnings and artistic recognition in her later years, she was decorated in 1985 with the National Medal of Arts, the highest distinction for the arts in the United States. She died in New York on April 17, 1988.