Nick Cave Biography

Performance artist Nick Cave was born February 4, 1959 in Jefferson City, Missouri. His mother, Sharon, raised him and his seven brothers. Cave seemed to take after his great grandfather, who was a poet and painter. At George Washington Carver School in Fulton, Missouri and at West Junior High School, Cave, influenced by Michael Jackson, showed performance and artistic ability. Graduating from Hickman High School in 1977, he enrolled in the Kansas City Art Institute where he continued to express himself through both visual art and dance. In 1979, Cave met Alvin Ailey and spent that summer and several summers thereafter in New York City studying with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. Graduating from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1981, he designed displays for Macy's Department Store and practiced professionally as a high fashion clothing designer, artist and dancer. Cave earned his M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in 1988.

Joining the faculty of the Art Institute of Chicago immediately after graduation, Cave has built a reputation as an educator and performance artist, especially with his ritualistic "Soundsuits." These sculpted, full body "Soundsuits" are layered and textured in metal, plastic, fabric, hair, and found objects designed to rattle and resonate in concert with the movement of the wearer, usually Cave himself. The suits ritualize Cave's feelings about the isolation and insulation attendant to being a black male in America. One of Cave's latest projects was Drop: Soundsuits in Degrees of Observation, a performance parade featuring ten dancers and sixty "Soundsuits." In 2007, he is planning an event in Chicago involving three dance companies, musicians and over 120 sculptured suits.

As an artist in residence at schools and colleges from Richmond, Virginia to Montana, Cave enjoys working with students and youth. Exhibitions of his assemblage sculptures in Amsterdam's The Arts Connexion, New York City's American Craft Museum and Hannover, Germany's Kestener Museum are earning Cave an international following.

Cave lives in Chicago's South Loop.

Cave was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on July 22, 2004.