In 1905, Louise Nevelson (1899, Kiev, Ukraine - 1988, New York, United States) left czarist Russia with her family and immigrated to the US, landing in Rockland, Maine. She relocated to New York City by 1920, when she first enrolled in the Art Students League and then studied acting. Nevelson crossed Europe in the early 1930s and briefly studied at Hans Hofmann's school in Munich. She later returned to New York in 1932 and resumed her studies with Hofmann.

During the 1930s, Nevelson took part in a number of group exhibitions; the first one was arranged by the Secession Gallery and took place in 1935 at the Brooklyn Museum. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1941 at the Nierendorf Gallery in New York. This was the first of several solo exhibitions she would have with the gallery over the course of a decade interspersed with trips to Europe, printmaking experiments, and work at the Sculpture Center in New York. After visiting Guatemala and Mexico to see Pre-Columbian art in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Nevelson started creating a series of wood landscape sculptures.

Her early all-black sculptures revealed a concern in shadow and space, establishing a visual vocabulary that would later come to define a large portion of her output starting in the mid-1950s. Three museums in New York provided acquisitions to support this trend. Black Majesty (1955) was acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1956, and First Personage (1956) was acquired by the Brooklyn Museum the following year. Soon after, Sky Cathedral (1958) was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, which further supported her career by included Dawn's Wedding Feast (1959) in the landmark group exhibition Sixteen Americans (1959–60). In 1961, Nevelson held her debut exhibition at Boston's The Pace Gallery. In 1962, she briefly exhibited at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, showcasing her as the first female Abstract Expressionist and sculptor on Janis's roster. Pace then took up her representation, which has continued since 1963. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York hosted the exhibition The Face in the Moon in 2018, which highlighted the artist's work in collage, printing, and drawing that covered her transition from the human body to abstraction.

Nevelson's compositions encapsulate the objectification of the outside world into a personal environment by exploring the relationship possibilities of sculpture and space. Her approach is rooted in the constructivism of Vladimir Tatlin and the cubism of Picasso, but it also bears similarities to Abstract Expressionism due to the pictorial attitude of her work and her fascination with the transcendence of space and object.