James Grashow

James Grashow built a world out of the least permanent material he could find. For six decades he cut, folded and glued corrugated cardboard into cities, cathedrals, fountains and menageries, at a scale that took over the rooms it entered — work made with the full knowledge that cardboard sags, softens and eventually goes. He treated that ending as part of the piece rather than a flaw in it.

He took a BFA and an MFA at Pratt Institute, in 1963 and 1965, and a Fulbright grant took him to Florence. Alongside the sculpture he was a woodcut artist and illustrator of long standing, and his hand reached a generation that never set foot in a gallery: the cover of Jethro Tull's Stand Up is his.

The monkeys are the most companionable thing he made. Life-size and cut from cardboard, each one hung overhead on a swing of wood and twine, so that they swing, dangle and reach from one another, they have filled museum lobbies as a deliberate visual racket just above the heads of the people walking through — at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, and in the lobby of the San José Museum of Art.

In his late seventies he turned to carving, in part because wood lasts. The Cathedral, an eight-foot basswood figure finished in June 2024 and the work he called his masterpiece, was the culmination of that turn. He died at home in Redding on September 15, 2025, at eighty-three.

Grashow's work is held in museum collections and has been shown at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Art Complex Museum and the Taubman Museum of Art, among others.