Sculptor and Educator. Born to a Jewish family in Austrian Galicia, in the village of Wolowa now known as Mezhgorye, Ukraine, amid the turmoil of World War I, the family fled but they returned when Austria retook the town in 1915 as refugees of the war. When World War I ended, he and his brother went to Budapest to join their older siblings. He was accepted by the art academy in Budapest, though within a year, a new regime took over attempting to expel all Jews and foreigners from the country. After being deported from Hungary, he began art studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, Austria shortly before immigrating to the United States in 1921. His continued studying in the United States at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design and at the Art Students League of New York. He also attended the Educational Alliance Art School. In 1926, he started teaching at The Educational Alliance and continued teaching there for the next 50 years. Louise Nevelson was among his students at the Alliance in 1934, during the time she was transitioning from painting to sculpture. He began exhibiting sculpture in group shows of students at the Educational Alliance, and then at the Jewish Art Center in the Bronx. In the late 1920s and early 1930s he exhibited at the Salons of America exhibitions at the Anderson Galleries and in 1928, at the Whitney Studio Club, the precursor to the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1929, he experimented with printmaking, and created an important group of 15 linocuts and lithographs of landscapes, New York City streets and parks, women in interiors, the circus, and vaudeville. The entire suite is now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He returned to the medium of printmaking in the 1960s, and produced approximately 200 works in the medium over the next two decades. In March 1932, he had his first solo exhibition at Gallery 144 in New York City. He was primarily a practitioner of the direct carving method, with the majority of his work being carved from wood. Works by Gross can be found in major museums and private collections throughout the United States, with substantial holdings at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. A key work from this era is the 1932 birds-eye maple Acrobatic Performers now on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 1933, he joined the government's Public Works of Art Project which turned into the Works Progress Administration which he worked for later in the 1930s. Under these programs, he taught and demonstrated art, made sculptures that were placed in schools and public colleges, made work for Federal buildings including the Federal Trade Commission Building, and for the France Overseas and Finnish Buildings at the 1939 New York World's Fair. He received a silver medal at the Exposition universelle de 1937 in Paris and a purchase prize at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Artists for Victory" exhibition for his wood sculpture of famed circus performer Lillian Leitzel in 1942. In 1949, he sketched Chaim Weizmann, President of Israel, at several functions in New York City where Weizmann was speaking. He began a portrait in clay and then traveled to Israel in the summer of that year hoping to be able to meet Weizmann and have him sit for a portrait. Weizmann was too ill, but Gross completed the bust in bronze later that year. He returned to Israel for three months in 1951 to paint a series of 40 watercolors of life in various cities. This series was exhibited at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan in 1953. In the 1950s, he began to make more bronze sculptures alongside his wood and stone pieces, and in 1957 and 1959, he traveled to Rome to work with famed bronze foundries including the Nicci foundry. At the end of the decade Gross was working primarily in bronze, which allowed him to create open forms, large-scale works and multiple casts. His large-scale bronze The Family, donated to New York City in 1991 in honor of Mayor Ed Koch, and installed at the Bleecker Street Park at 11th street, is now a fixture of Greenwich Village. In 1957, he published The Techniques of Wood Sculpture, a how-to book with photographs of him at work by photographer Eliot Elisofon. In 1959, a survey of his sculpture in wood, stone, and bronze was featured in the exhibit Four American Expressionists curated by Lloyd Goodrich at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1963, he and his family moved from their longtime residence to Greenwich Village, following the purchase of a four-story historic townhouse and studio. The townhouse is now the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation, winner of a 2015 Village Award from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, and open to the public. In 1974, the Smithsonian American Art Museum held the exhibition, Chaim Gross: Sculpture and Drawings. In 1976, a selection from his collection of historic African sculpture, formed since the late 1930s, was exhibited at the Worcester Art Museum in the show The Sculptor's Eye: The African Art Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Chaim Gross. In 1977, he had three retrospective exhibitions: at the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, followed by the Montclair Art Museum; and the Jewish Museum in Manhattan. He received multiple honorary doctorates in the 1970s and 80s: from Franklin and Marshall College (1970); Yeshiva University (1978); Adelphi University (1980); Hebrew Union College (1984); and Brooklyn College (1986). In 1979, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1981. In 1984, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, with Jacob Lawrence and Lukas Foss. He was a member of the New York Artists Equity Association and the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors and was a founder and served as the first president of the Sculptors Guild.