Nancy Graves rose to prominence in the art world more as a taxidermist than an artist.

Graves was born in 1939 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and grew up going to the Berkshire Museum where her father was assistant to the director. The museum focused on art, natural history, and ancient civilizations, which obviously inspired Graves’ whole taxidermy thing. I mean with a last name like Graves, she had to be either a taxidermist or a mortician. By the time lil Nance was 12 years old she knew she wanted to be an artist. And an artist she became.

Graves went to Vassar college and majored in English Literature and then went to Yale, where she earned her B.F.A. and her M.F.A. She had some heavy-hitters for classmates – Chuck Close, Sylvia and Robert Mangold, and Richard Serra, her boyf. After graduating, Nance got a Fulbright Scholarship and moved to Paris. Serra came along shortly after but their landlady flipped out when she found out that they were living in sin under her roof. So before she had a chance to throw them out, they got married! After their year in Paris ended, Serra got his own Fulbright Scholarship (such a copycat) and the two of them moved to Florence. And this is where it all began for Graves.

She discovered the wax models of Clemente Susini, a seventeenth century anatomist and all of a sudden it hit her…camels! Graves decided to make giant half-taxidermied/half-sculpted camels because “the horse was too familiar, she just didn’t think a moose was that elegant, and an elephant wasn’t very interesting as a form either." But she thought that the camel was bizarre enough and unknown enough that people would really stop and notice. And boy, was she was right. This jump started her career and she got a solo show at the Whitney Museum when she was just 29 years old. Everyone loved Graves and her giant camels. Then she tried going back to painting for a minute, but the New York Times said that her “paintings are big disappointments and an embarrassment to the sculptural talent of Miss Graves” which was way harsh. But she still had a solo exhibition at the Whitney, so she recovered. She did not, however, recover from ovarian cancer, which ended her short and talent-packed life at the age of 55.