In 1957, Louise Nevelson (1899–1988) installed one of her first “Sky Cathedral” sculptures in the lobby of her brother’s hotel, the historic Thorndike Hotel in Rockland, Maine. It hung there for ten years until it was acquired by the pioneering collectors of American sculpture Jean and Howard Lipman. The Lipmans displayed the massive wooden assemblage of black painted boxes in Howard Lipman’s Manhattan business office. Sky Cathedral (1957) became a central piece in the family’s collection when in the 1970s they moved to Arizona and built a new house to accommodate its monumental scale. Their son Peter, along with his wife, Beverly, generously donated the sculpture to the San Jose Museum of Art in 2010.

Louise Nevelson: The Fourth Dimension brings this important work in SJMA’s permanent collection together with personal objects and ephemera from the Peter and Beverly Lipman Collection.