by Laura Welikson
The sculptor Bradford Graves had a lifelong passion for
stone. During a time when sculptors were turning to
industrial materials such as steel, aluminum, and
plastic to recast their interpretation of the modern world,
Graves’ use of such a traditional material was
unorthodox. His creations embrace the ongoing
tension between old and new; they conjure up images
which are at once mysteriously ancient and remarkably
modern.
Graves (1939–1998) was born in Dallas, Texas, and
moved to New York in 1958 to pursue sculptural
studies. He attended programs at the School of the
Visual Arts, the American School of Art, and the New School, where he studied with sculptor Seymour
Lipton, one of his great early influences. While producing his own art, Graves also taught for several
years; he served on the faculty at Parsons School of Design in New York from 1974 to 1980 and at
Farleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey from 1969 to 1998. During his life, he traveled
throughout the world, spending long periods of time in Greece, Israel, Scotland, Haiti, Japan, Eastern
Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the American Southwest, places that provided a rich cultural palette
and informed his artistic imagination.
What is apparent in all of his work is a deep reverence for the material, resolving in a spiritual connection
with the earth. Graves wrote,
The making of sculpture may be taken as my desire for wholeness, the recognition of my identity as
being a part of the earth and its materials. In the confrontation between my inner image of what I want to
make and the actuality of the physical materials, a dialogue begins, and the result of that dialogue is a
sculptural statement.
He felt most comfortable working in limestone and personally selected the original blocks from quarries
in Indiana, Texas, and Kentucky. Graves said limestone reminded him of the hills he was born in.
Throughout his life, he felt a profound connection with the American Southwest. The awesome rock
formations were for him nature’s breathtaking sculpture park. His visits to Native American stone ruins in
places like Chaco Canyon and Canyon de Chelly also provided inspiration and imagery that infused a
number of his works.
Some of Graves’ most original pieces can be found in This Mirror Can Crack a Stone, a series of twenty-
two works produced between 1981 and 1984. This exhibition includes This Mirror Can Crack a Stone I, a
long horizontal piece that draws the viewer into an unusual aerial perspective. In effect, the viewer is
compelled to examine the ground beneath her feet and freed from the habitual path of vision: she is
bidden to reengage with the earth. Much of the piece has the look of rugged, exposed terrain, untouched
save for the decisive symmetry of the three carved circles across its central axis. This contrast between
the material’s natural state and the chiseled imprint of the artist highlights the interaction between man
and nature, the active dialogue between the sculptor and his material. Graves further accentuates this
balance by allowing the limestone slabs to retain some of the tool markings from the quarry. The man-
made rings also call to mind ruined Kivas, ancient Native American above-and-below-ground
ceremonial structures, like those found in Chaco Canyon or Pueblo Bonito. Graves incorporated the
solemn mystery of these sites into the Mirror pieces. The three circles each contain smaller sections
inlaid with a honeycomb of bamboo reeds. Like the inner chambers of a Kiva, they invite us to explore an
interior dimension of the piece.
The smaller bronze work This Mirror Can Crack a Stone XXII presents the circle motif recessed in the
center of a multi-tiered tablet. Two winged appendages fitted on either side of the circle look as if the
sculpture’s skin has been peeled back to reveal its interior. As much a portal as a mirror, the sculpture
teases out the meaning of Graves’ title, which is a wry subversion of Henry David Thoreau’s description
of Walden Pond, “a mirror which no stone can crack...a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks,
swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush.” In Graves’ title, subject and object are transposed. The mirror
as metaphor for the self acts upon the stone and alters perception through art. The mirror does not
present a mere reflection of reality; it introduces another dimension of vision.
Throughout his career, Graves was intrigued by the concept of tools. A tool’s form, however ingenious, is
determined by its function, yet Graves felt there was a real mystery in tools. How did people decide that a
certain form was ideally suited to perform its function? Graves deconstructed this relationship through
sculptures of wheels, axes, walkways. Gauve II, one of a related group of sculptures Graves made in the
late 1970s, is a reinterpretation of the bridge, but, given the work’s sharp curvature and rhythmic carving,
no one could walk upon it. Slat Breakdown, a small bronze sculpture, is a walkway, whose slats are
jumbled, bending at their joints and curling fancifully. What would have been stairs on an incline have
been lifted up and left to dangle over a precariously smooth slope of metal. The form is separated from its
utilitarian purpose and its meaning is redefined as art object—and yet the original function still hovers in
the work’s form and material.
Graves had eclectic tastes and a voracious appetite for books and music. He built up an impressive
library and record collection throughout his life. Graves closely followed musicians in jazz and avant-
garde music and named a number of works and series after people whose music he admired. Graves
named one early series of works Dolphy after the alto saxophonist, flutist, and bass clarinetist Eric
Dolphy. This exhibition includes the first piece in the series, Dolphy I, a weathered limestone work
composed of six units atop a stone base. Graves created the piece early in his career, in 1973, and it
shows him working through the concepts of cubism and constructivism. Graves had discussed the use of
constructivist methods in his own work as a way of allowing space to become an active part of the form.
“This is a unifying method of working,” he wrote, “that permits each unit of my sculpture to create its own
reasons for existence.” Much of Graves’ sculpture is abstract, and yet there are recognizable reference
points which dot the imagination—one can perhaps see in the long arched block, lightly pressing on one
of the limestone discs, a finger arrested in motion along the sonorous valves of a saxophone. The upper
block also retains those characteristic grooves left from hoisting in the quarry, a visual remembrance of
its origins as a monolithic block of stone. Other musically inspired pieces in this exhibition include the
two November Steps sculptures, which Graves completed a month before he died. They were named
after a musical composition by the Japanese avant-garde composer Toru Takemitsu.
The influence of constructivism can be seen more subtly in two of Graves’ later pieces, Gonaive (1982)
and Stuttering His Own Bent (1995). Gonaive, with its seductively smooth surfaces and mesmerizing
geometry, is one of many of Graves’ works that possesses a kind of easy charm. Here, the sections are
contained within one piece, each one layered upon the other, creating a series of sinuous folds that call
to mind the concentric circles of a seashell, or perhaps some other-worldly astronaut’s helmet. The
evocatively titled Stuttering His Own Bent contains four major units, varied by texture, shape, and design.
The sections are stacked vertically one upon another, giving the piece a totemic, anthropomorphic
quality. The capping stone easily suggests a phallus but at second glance the sculpture also seems to
be arching forward and trying to speak. Where there would be a mouth, however, there is only a
wordless mask of stone.
Some of Graves’ work mingles the ethereal and abstract with a physical, biological reality, as one can
observe in the series Loud in the Blood, begun in 1984. In that one year, both his mother and father died
of heart disease and Graves himself suffered a major heart attack. The tumultuous events greatly
affected his imagery. Loud in the Blood IV has the cool archaeological look of a ruined aqueduct. From
its title, however, one interprets the cascading water as a stream of blood flowing out of a stone cavity,
which is also vaguely reminiscent of the mirror series motif. The oozing blood collects in a sluice-like
trough below. A thin crossbar straddles the channel as the pool of liquid clots into a tumid bead, which
threatens to break and spill over the edge. It is an exploration of mortality and the body’s fragility framed
within the crumbling structure of civilizations past. The subject is sublimated, rendered even playful.
Ravages of Silent Agencies, a small piece carved from African wonderstone, also shares this whimsical
exploration of time and decay’s effect on living forms. On the back side, a scarab-like relief is perched
upon a smooth rim of stone. A maze of small white lines radiate out of the figure and cover the piece in
all directions. They look as if they’ve slowly wormed their way through the stone: centuries of
imperceptible tunneling motion leaving behind a marvelous web of corrosion—the ravages of silent
agencies.
Though primarily a sculptor, Graves produced many pen and ink drawings, pencil sketches, and torn-
and layered-paper collages, as well as illustrations for art and music events and collaborations with
poets and other writers. His drawings range from representational portraits to studies in design to images
of cosmic spheres colliding and collapsing in space. They share with his sculptures a certain playfulness
as well as a driven curiosity about man’s relationship to space—about our place within the cosmos.
More than any other art form, sculpture engages with space, allowing space to become a part of the form,
and making us aware of our position within it. Through his dialogue with stone, carried out with chisel,
hammer, die-grinder, point, and claw, Graves was able to fathom the mystery of the universe. As he put it,
“You become a link in the movement of the universe as it circles through space. You become a part of a
mystery. You are within and participating in that mystery,” rather than looking on and defining it from the
outside. One can find in each of Bradford Graves’ works some element of that encounter, out of which a
quiet sense of mystery and tranquility is born.