Nancy Grossman is known for her disturbing sculptures and drawings of leather-bound heads and figures. Born in New York City, she was the eldest in a family of five children. When she was six, her Italian mother and Jewish father, along with two aunts, bought a farm in Oneonta, New York, and the three families, including sixteen children, resettled there.

Unhappy, and always in "hot water", in her rural high school, Grossman decided she wanted to be an artist. She began studies at the Pratt Institute in 1958. When her family fell on hard times and had to move to Arizona, she defied her fathers command to return home, instead getting a scholarship and a job so that she could remain at Pratt. Grossman has said she remembers feeling ter...