Nancy Shaver

The artist Nancy Shaver is as much a matchmaker as a sculptor, collecting items for her assemblages and then setting them up together in happy little homes. Based in Hudson, New York, where she runs a curiosity shop by the name of Henry, Shaver brings a similarly idiosyncratic eye to sculptures, pairing found objects—a stack of egg crates, for instance, or a cluster of wooden boxes—that she sometimes leaves unaltered, sometimes slathers with a brightly colored coat of house paint.

Often grouped with such artist contemporaries as Richard Tuttle and Tony Fehrer, and sharing the serendipitous aesthetic DNA of Louise Nevelson, Shaver also claims a less apparent influence: the photographer Walker Evans, who was her teacher and friend. While Shaver has only received a paucity of museum exhibitions, she has long been acclaimed by critics, and she has been supported by such prestigious grants as a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2010, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 1993, and Yaddo and MacDowell fellowships in the early 1970s.