Nevelson’s life and work were revolutionised by twenty years of studying dance with Ellen Kearns, who taught a form of bodily expression aimed at discovering one’s life force and creative energy, and also by her fascination with the art of Martha Graham in the 1930s. In 1950, her discovery of Mexico and Guatemala gave her work, now characterised by a mixture of geometry and magic, a monumental dimension. Under this dual influence, her environments became gradually monumental, enveloping, totemic and sacred.  In 1958, although the term installation did not emerge until the 1960s, Nevelson presented her first large environment, at Grand Central Moderns, in New York, which she titled ‘Moon Garden + One’, and in which she presented her first ‘wall’, Sky Cathedral, a vertical tribute to New York, her adopted city. The work is made up of salvaged wooden objects, which she assembled in boxes that she piled up and painted black, unifying the composition in a monochrome veil. Above and beyond the synthesis that she created of Pre-Colombian art, Cubism and colour field painting, Nevelson imagined a place for exploration, rather than a sculpture to be viewed frontally.  For each of her environments, which John Cage described as music theatre, Nevelson displays a particular interest in space and light. She adorned some of her works with blue, intensifying the shadows and disorientating the viewer in darkness. Nevelson created scenes with which the viewer’s entire body is engaged. Theatricality probably constituted the cornerstone of all these large exhibitions, from Dawn’s Wedding Feast created in 1959 at the Museum of Modern Art for the exhibition ‘Sixteen Americans’ to Mrs. N’s Palace, a major work drawn from Edward Albee’s play Tiny Alice, from which the exhibition borrowed its title. Fifty years after her last exhibition in France, in 1974, at the Centre National d’Art et de Culture, the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou-Metz will offer an immersion in her multiple ‘atmospheres’, in the hope of fulfilling the Nevelson’s wish to display her sculptures as part of a total space, in a narration that opens the doors to her imaginary world, an experience to be enjoyed with all of the senses, and not as individual entities. The reconstruction of her environments will highlight the various media that she used, from her first terracotta figures and paintings to her engravings and Plexiglas sculptures and her installations, not forgetting her collages – the template for her art – which she created from the 1950s to the end of her life.