James Grashow, the Redding sculptor and woodcut artist who is best known for album covers for Jethro Tull and the Yardbirds as well as creating an cardboard version of Rome's Trevi Fountain, died Sept. 15 at his home at 83 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, The New York Times reported.
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield displayed the artist's famous 25-by-17-foot fountain "Corrugated Fountain," in 2012. At the museum, Grashow's work began to dissolve, as the artist intended. Though it took him four years to complete the elaborate work, Grashow explained to CT Insider in 2012 that "the idea of a paper fountain is impossible, an oxymoron that speaks to the human dilemma." The artwork was the subject of the 2012 documentary "The Cardboard Bernini."
Cybele Maylone, Executive Director of The Aldrich, remembers Grashow being "a really important and beloved part of the fabric of the museum." During his life, Grashow was in eight shows at The Aldrich with his first being in the 1980s, Maylone said. She said people will often come up to her around town and bring up the impact of Grashow's work on them.
"He was just a really important part of the arts community in this area," Maylone said. "He was a really beloved, central figure that I think so many artists in our region orbited around, and that was just because of the warm, curious, fun, funny and engaging person that he was."
Maylone recalls being impressed by his ability to transform everyday objects like cardboard and transforming them into complex works of art that felt accessible to the thousands of people that were able to see his work at the museum.
"He took the humble material of cardboard and transformed in into these otherworldly creations. I think there is something about using this material that is so omnipresent, that we all engage with," Maylone said. "Now every time I put a cardboard box into a recycling bin, I think, 'Gosh, the other life this material could have in Jimmy's hands.'"
Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1942, Grashow received a bachelor's degree in fine arts from Pratt Institute. After a year abroad in Florence, Italy on a Fulbright Travel Grant, he returned to Pratt to receive his master's, according to his website.
Grashow, who created sculptures that mixed the gothic with pop art, had recently finished creating a woodcut called "The Cathedral," which took him four years to complete. The making of the work —which depicts Jesus bearing a cathedral on his back while fanged and horned figures, gesticulating and glowering, emerge from flames, was the subject of a 2025 film, "Jimmy and the Demons."
"My heart is breaking from the loss of a truly great man, beautiful spirit and the kindest person I know," "Jimmy and the Demons" director Cindy Meehl wrote in a statement on Facebook. "Jimmy was pure love and made everyone he met feel important and loved. It is a rare gift and I am forever grateful he spent three years letting us tell his story. He has gone back to the heavens as a shining star. Rest in peace, my dear friend, ‘til we meet again."
Describing the work as "playful and surreal and obsessively detailed," the New York Times wrote that the film concerned, "Grashow’s ruminations about life, or more accurately, death. The film captures the artist’s view about the sculpture possibly being the 'grand finale' of his career and his belief that he is 'in the bottom of the ninth' of his life. The feeling of mortality is strong. Even more resonate, however, are Grashow’s passion for his craft and love for his family."
“I wanted to make a piece that was heroic and eternal in its nature, but was at its base an impossibility,” Grashow told The Times. “A cardboard fountain speaks exactly to that. It reflects the human condition: you aspire to do something, to be something, but you’re doomed to mortality.”
Includes reporting from staff writer Tracey O’Shaughnessy.
Andrew DaRosa is a SPJ award-winning journalist who has worked at Hearst Connecticut Media Group since 2018. He currently works as a Senior Audience Producer and a Trending Reporter for CT Insider and also runs the SEEN section.
He can often be found covering Connecticut’s expanding music scene, supposedly “haunted” sites around the state or keeping track of big winners in the Connecticut Lottery. He has been at the forefront of multiple music-related stories around Connecticut, including the Sound On Sound music festival. With a passion for music, over the past decade, Andrew has interviewed members of Judas Priest, Goose, The National, Trey Anatasio Band, The Head and the Heart and Maren Morris.
Originally from Massachusetts, Andrew graduated from Fairfield University in 2018 with a degree in digital journalism. Since working for Hearst Connecticut, Andrew has become a four-time winner of Connecticut Society of Professional Journalism awards for his coverage of Connecticut band Goose, hiking the state and his human interest stories.
When he isn’t writing about Ed and Lorraine Warren or jam bands, Andrew can be found going to concerts with his wife or hanging out with his cat, Spud.