Don Nice: Early Works, 1963–68 brings together paintings and sculptures from two distinct bodies of work — larger-than-life American motifs based on labels and advertisements, and meticulously detailed renderings of isolated consumer objects and everyday foods — alongside his Object Boxes of 1964. Emerging from Yale's graduate painting program alongside Chuck Close, Richard Serra, and Nancy Graves, Nice developed a "personal realism" rooted in the vernacular imagery of fruit crate labels encountered on his California farm. Rather than adopting Pop Art's irony, he treated these images as sites of sincere study — the crowned beauty queen and the devotional icon functioning as parallel forms of elevation, transforming the ordinary into something revered.
