The Cathedral, Jimmy Grashow’s stunning new sculpture made of intricately carved bass wood, is his magnum opus representing morality, temptation, and redemption. Grashow, a Redding resident for over fifty years, is an artist whose work is both astonishing and thought-provoking. His beautifully fraught yet exquisitely produced Cathedral features apostles and demons and the fire of hell below Jesus in his thorny crown carrying the holy cathedral on his back. The finely detailed cathedral touts herald angels, apostles, and stained glass. Inside, the private collector who commissioned the sculpture kneels before a beautiful mural and an ornate altar.
Grashow worked on The Cathedral, which stands eight feet tall, for more than four years, honing over that time both the many carvings and the symbolism. The piece began as drawings and then as a cardboard prototype, and he worked to fine tune each part.
“The Cathedral at its core is about mortality and keeping faith through life,” says Grashow. “We live in an unbelievably insane, chaotic world, with demons and struggles all over. We move forward and we try to understand how to keep our faith alive. The cathedral is anchored at its bottom by tortured souls, but it’s crowned at the top by a crane reaching for hope and eternity.”
Jimmy Grashow is a truly special person to meet. His lively stories and wry sense of humor spark a sense of energy and ease in those he meets, and “dull” is never a word that would come to mind when in his company. He lives in Redding with his wife Lesley, better known by her nickname Guzzy, who shares Jimmy’s magnetism and his passion for his work. They have been together for fifty-eight years and share two children and five grandchildren.
For the past several decades, Jimmy Grashow has focused on sculptures and installations uniquely made of corrugated cardboard, bronze pieces for sculpture gardens, and carved wood pieces. His iconic Fish-Floral-Fowl pieces with colorful fish and ocean waves, herons and pheasants, and flowers both realistic and whimsical — some have houses emerging from the blossoms and are dubbed House Plants — are elaborate and engaging. He has also constructed larger-than-life ten-foot-tall dancing couples and mythical Greek sculptures.
Some of the most eye-catching cardboard creations are Grashow’s monkeys; each has its own personality. They first appeared, along with elephants, tigers, and rhinos, in Grashow’s 1998 Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum installation called YaZoo Cardboard Zoo. The monkeys then expanded to a troop of one hundred and went on to cavort at museums across the country.
“If you have cardboard, scissors, and tape, you can build the world,” says Grashow. “Play is the engine of creation and cardboard is the perfect playmate. It’s mistake-proof. You worry about messing up a canvas, but cardboard thinks of itself as trash.”
Grashow has had many other shows over his storied career. He’s exhibited his monkeys at the Mezzanine Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an Under the Sea cardboard world at MASS MoCA, and the Great Sea Serpent Project at the Peabody Essex Museum. In addition, his work is in the permanent collections at prominent establishments, including the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, and the Library of Congress. He also works with bronze and has casted iterations of both his famous monkeys and his elegant dancers for various institutions and venues.
Grashow is well known for his woodcut illustrations and prints, and his work has appeared in nearly every major publication and periodical. His woodcuts regularly appeared in the New York Times for thirty years. He also created iconic woodcut album covers for Jethro Tull, The Yardbirds, and many other groups
in the 1960s and ‘70s. “I love working with wood and the feel of it. It’s a natural fit for me,” he says.
For the last two years, renowned filmmaker Cindy Meehl has been producing a documentary detailing Grashow’s extensive artistry and work on The Cathedral. The film, which will be released in 2025, delves deep into the complexities of the artist’s life and process. “I have known Jimmy and Guzzy for many years and had seen The Cathedral in its early stages,” says Meehl. “I wanted to make a short film about Jimmy creating this incredible work of art but quickly realized it was a feature film documentary. We have filmed mostly in his studio, which is a colorfully cluttered treasure chest of his inspired work. Delightfully infectious, Jimmy and his zestful wife and partner Guzzy have embraced my film crew like family, and the journey of this remarkably moving work of art is an enthralling one, one that my team and I are privileged and ever grateful to be on.”
“It was thrilling when Cindy decided to do a documentary about The Cathedral,” Jimmy Grashow says. “The whole idea of someone recording the process is phenomenal. Everybody looks at completed pieces, but no one sees the work underneath it all. A documentary film and a work of art is similar in that they both are looking for a conclusion; they’re both following a process. It was thrilling to have this double process of discovery going on at once.”
“Sometimes it was incredibly difficult to have a film crew following us around for two years because you start to look at yourself and hear yourself talk,” he continues. “You’re conscious of people watching you, and it sometimes changes the way you look at yourself and your singular, internal process. But it became easier as we moved through it, and Cindy and her crew were so wonderful to work with.”
“A documentary being made about me at eighty-two years old is melancholy and bittersweet in a way,” finishes Grashow. “You’re constantly looking at your life. When you spend so much time working, you’re just moving forward and following a thread. With everyone filming and watching you, you look more closely at your time and how you got to the place you are.”
Grashow’s exquisite Cathedral marks his sixty-year legacy of creating art that seizes the viewer’s attention. So much of his work has tackled what it is to be alive, whether it’s movement, nature, playfulness, or mortality, and his most recent oeuvre is his crowning achievement in pushing us to contemplate life, our impermanence, and humanity. •