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You can define my work conceptual, as you can call it sensual. I like to think there’s less to read and more to touch, less to say and more to feel.

— NANCY GROSSMAN

Nancy Grossman (b. 1940) is an American sculptor and printmaker best known for her psychologically charged sculptures that explore themes of identity, power, vulnerability, and the human condition. Born in New York City and raised in rural Massachusetts, Grossman studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, before earning her B.F.A. from Tufts University in 1962. She later settled in New York, where she became associated with a generation of artists who challenged the conventions of postwar American sculpture. While she has worked in a variety of media throughout her career, Grossman is most celebrated for her meticulously crafted sculptures of human heads, often wrapped in hand-stitched leather.

Grossman rose to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s with these iconic leather-bound heads, works that combine extraordinary craftsmanship with emotional intensity. Their surfaces evoke protection, restraint, anonymity, and strength simultaneously, resisting any singular interpretation. Although critics have frequently associated the sculptures with themes of bondage and sexuality, Grossman has consistently emphasized that her work is rooted in human psychology and the complexity of lived experience rather than symbolism alone. Alongside her sculpture, she has maintained an extensive printmaking practice, creating etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts that reflect the same expressive energy found in her three-dimensional work.

Over the course of her six-decade career, Grossman’s work has been exhibited at leading museums and galleries throughout the United States and internationally, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the National Gallery of Art. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972 and has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions that have reaffirmed her place as one of the most original voices in contemporary American sculpture. Today, her work is represented in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide and continues to be celebrated for its uncompromising vision, technical mastery, and profound exploration of the human psyche.