How Artist Nick Cave Memorializes His Ancestors Through ‘Mammoth’ Work

An exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum spotlights how everyday objects can serve as the foundation for artistic expression

Shantay Robinson | Museum Correspondent 

August 4, 2026 4:50 p.m.

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For visual artist Nick Cave, mammoths, the large extinct elephant-like creatures that lived thousands of years ago, symbolize what’s buried underneath the ground—like so many ancestral stories. In his recent exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Cave uses the megafauna to bring those stories to the surface.

When Cave visited the museum in 2017 to give a talk, he and contemporary art curator Sarah Newman walked around looking at the collection. Cave was thinking about the 19th-century landscape paintings on display and wondered, Newman recalls, “What’s under the surface of those landscapes, and how can we explore that?” Those questions sparked the idea for the exhibition “Nick Cave: Mammoth,” open at the museum through January 3, 2027.

Cave excavates the mammoth through his own creations and also rescues found objects connected to family histories, showing what has been lost and what remains. Visitors will see lifeguard-style chairs topped with imitations of mammoth tusks, and a wearable mammoth costume made with a wooden frame, also featured in a video installation.

“We continue to dig up these fossils, these bones of these prehistoric animals that have been gone for centuries, and they still reveal themselves,” Cave says.

And like the mammoth, the scale of Cave’s work is big. Central to the display is a massive lighted platform filled with hundreds of everyday objects that Cave collected from his family’s homes and from flea markets, thrift stores and eBay, as well as some that he made himself. “It looks like a landscape of amazing vernacular folk objects,” Newman says.

The nostalgic items collected and meticulously organized on the platform, from a hobby horse to a jewelry box to a party punch bowl, take us back to intimate moments in our own lives.

“Everything on that table was, in some form or another, handmade,” says Cave. “And so that was the thing that I also sort of found interesting, that the things I collected from my family were all things that they also appreciated.”

More odes to the artist’s family life abound: A beaded tapestry called Palimpsest (Promised Land), made in collaboration with his partner, Bob Faust, represents the large landscape of Cave’s grandparents’ farm where he spent time in his youth.

Cave makes his thesis clear in the wall text at the entrance of the exhibition: “Each marker, memory and connector might be described as small, special and specific, but collectively they are mammoth.”

Cave’s art comments on both the environment and personal identity. “He’s been thinking about identity and how people in the world see you, and what your place in the world is,” Newman says. “And he’s really expanding that idea in this new body of work where he’s thinking about the elements and building blocks of identity.”

Born in Fulton, Missouri, in 1959, Cave was raised by a single mother as one of seven boys. He was always crafting—even repairing hand-me-down clothes from his older brothers. Both of his grandfathers were craftsmen themselves, and his grandmother was a quilter.

“What brought me to this project was me asking myself, ‘How was I made?’” Cave says.

The artist continues, “Once I started to dig deep into that part of my history, I realized that I come from a family of makers: seamstresses, woodworkers, carpenters, painters, poets, fashion constructors. So, that was my upbringing. I was just surrounded by all that and realized that all those small influences multiplied. It was just mammoth in terms of the impact it had on my life.”

Most of his family members did their crafting after a day’s work, and they didn’t seek it out as a career possibility. They “appreciated the craft of making,” he says. “Mammoth” is largely inspired by that foundation, the “traditions and the creative legacies that he has absorbed and transformed in his own work,” Newman says.

“Mammoth” fits into Cave’s oeuvre perfectly; many of his creative markers, such as wearable sculptures and performance, are still present: As part of the video displayed across the exhibition’s walls, performers walk in a studio space and along a Chicago shore while carrying the mammoth costume on top of their shoulders. Cave’s maximalist sensibilities, evidenced in his costume-sculpture series Soundsuits, are at their height in this exhibition.

He gained prominence in the contemporary art scene in the early 1990s after creating his first Soundsuit, assembled from found objects, in the wake of Rodney King being beaten by police in Los Angeles. “The whole intention behind the suit was really to protect, as a suit of armor of sorts,” Cave says. “But it also hides gender, race, class, forcing you to look at something without judgement.”

The artist has created hundreds of the sculptures. His debut Soundsuit, composed of twigs, makes noise when it moves, lending the series its name.

The objects that Cave crafts with—wires, beads, buttons and more—become memorials to the past. He layers this exhibition with meaning that links viewers to the planet, to their own identities and to one another.

“It’s the collective memory aligning these artifacts,” he says. “A particular place in time, bridging the gap between the viewer and the artist, making these connections that we have a lot more in common than we don’t.”

Shantay Robinson is a freelance writer in Virginia who writes about Black art and culture.