Brinson identifies the Playboy drawings—soft, pastel-tinted renderings of models like Sharon Tate that look almost like Victorian cameos—as Bove’s first mature body of work, and they will be some of the earliest pieces on view at the Guggenheim. To make them, Bove looked at issues from the 1960s and early ’70s—she actually found a stack of the magazine in her parents’ closet, along with rejection letters to her mother, who had submitted her poetry for publication. Bove’s wish to revisit Playboy wasn’t just about the erotic; it explored the mix of sex and art, words and pictures. The drawings were a way of teasing out the contradictory world she was born into. Back then, Playboy published work by Ursula K. Le Guin, James Baldwin, and Alan Watts, and essays on progressive issues like access to birth control and opposing the Vietnam War. But what to make of the nude pictures? Was it empowering to pose for Playboy, or demeaning? The drawings poured out of her, and more work followed. “It was really continuous since then,” Bove says. “Everything is connected to that.”
Soon after, in the early aughts, Bove caught the broader attention of the art world
with her conceptual bookshelf installations. On repurposed Knoll tables and other midcentury-modern furniture, she’d situate those dreamy Playboy drawings and well-worn paperbacks from the ’60s and ’70s alongside found detritus like driftwood and shells. The meticulous tableaux struck a nerve. “Although the show looks casual, even accidental, it is anything but,” wrote New York Times critic Holland Cotter in 2003. “Every inclusion is meaningful, every placement minutely calculated.”
In 2012, Bove took what seemed like a hard left turn into outdoor sculpture. Up till then she had had a rule for herself, taken from the pages of conceptualism, that all the work had to use items that already existed. “At a certain point,” she says, “I wanted to make something that had different qualities, that was slick and not romantic.” The first appearance of a “glyph,” the name she gave her large, white powder-coated loop-de-loop steel works, was in a manicured garden at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany; the next year, in 2013, two more were installed in an unfinished portion of the High Line in Manhattan, along with other sculptures she made from salvaged I-beams, concrete, and brass. “Carol’s project was absolutely my favorite. I’ve been on the High Line for over 14 years, but that project was really, really special and unique,” says Cecilia Alemani, the director and chief curator of High Line Art. The juxtaposition of the derelict, self-seeded land with these glossy white interventions was a puzzle you couldn’t quite solve. “As people walked through, they would find these objects almost as relics of a weird civilization,” Alemani says.