James Grashow (1942–2025) was born in Brooklyn and spent over six decades making work that asked the same question from every angle: what does it mean to build something beautiful knowing it will not last. The beloved artist is best known for his large-scale cardboard sculptures — environmental installations that viewers walk through, inhabit, and watch change over time. His Corrugated Fountain, inspired by the Trevi Fountain in Rome, was built over three years with the full intention of being placed outside to disintegrate — an oxymoron, he said, that speaks to the human dilemma. It premiered at the Taubman Museum of Art in 2010, traveled to New York and Pittsburgh, and was finally installed outdoors at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut, where spring rains slowly took it apart. The project was documented in The Cardboard Bernini, a 2012 documentary directed by Olympia Stone. In 2025, director Cindy Meehl's Jimmy & The Demons premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, offering an intimate portrait of the artist in his final years. His prints appeared regularly in the New York Times and publications across the country. His houseplant sculptures — intricate bouquets where homes and buildings replace flowers — held the same preoccupation in miniature: the fragile relationship between what we make and what survives us. Grashow attended Pratt Institute, received a BFA, and was awarded a Fulbright Travel Grant for painting and graphics to Florence, Italy. He returned to Pratt for his MFA. His first sculpture show was at the Allan Stone Gallery in 1966, a relationship that continued for over fifty years. He lived and worked in Redding, Connecticut. "For me the fragility and the temporal nature of cardboard really marks my identity. I wish I could believe in forever, but eternity is an illusion."