Craig Starr Gallery is pleased to present Don Nice: early works, 1963-68 on view May–August 21, 2026.

Organized in collaboration with the artist’s estate, the exhibition brings together a selection of early work in both painting and sculpture.The presentation chiefly unites two distinct bodies of work—Nice’s larger than-life American motifs based on labels and ads, originally shown as a group at the Feigen + Herbert Gallery in 1963, and his meticulously detailed renderings of everyday objects and iconic consumer products. It will also include Nice’s Object boxes, 1964, first shown in the “The Box Show” at the Byron Gallery in 1965.

Emerging in the decades following Abstract Expressionism, Nice belongs to a generation shaped by its intensity yet determined to move beyond it. In 1962, at the age of thirty and after a sojourn through Europe where he apprenticed with the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka, Don Nice entered the Graduate School of Painting at Yale University where he studied under Alex Katz and Joseph Albers. Among his cohort were other greats including Chuck Close, Sylvia Plimack and Robert Mangold, Nancy Graves, and Richard Serra.

During this period, Nice immersed himself in art history, taking special interest in the Renaissance. Simultaneosly, he began to reflect more deliberately on his own American experiences: the orchards of his youth, the spectacle of beauty pageants, and the visual saturation of advertising. These seemingly disparate references began to converge. The enshrined Madonna and the crowned beauty queen, the devotional icon and the cartoon mascot—each functioned as a form of elevation, transforming the ordinary into something revered.