When Nevelson was developing her style, many of her artistic colleagues – Alexander Calder, David Smith, Theodore Roszak – were welding metal to create their large-scale sculptures. Nevelson decided to go in the opposite direction, exploring the streets for inspiration and finding it in wood. Nevelson's most notable sculptures are her walls; wooden, wall-like collage driven reliefs consisting of multiple boxes and compartments that hold abstract shapes and found objects from chair legs to balusters. Nevelson described these immersive sculptures as "environments". The wooden pieces were also cast-off scraps, pieces found in the streets of New York. While Marcel Duchamp caused uproar with his "Fountain", which was not accepted as "art" at the time of its release in 1917 due to Duchamp's attempt to mask the urinals true form, Nevelson took found objects and by spray painting them she disguised them of their actual use or meaning. Nevelson called herself "the original recycler" owing to her extensive use of discarded objects, and credited Pablo Picasso for "giving us the cube" that served as the groundwork for her cubist-style sculpture. She found strong influence in Picasso and Hofmann's cubist ideals, describing the Cubist movement as "one of the greatest awarenesses that the human mind has ever come to." She also found influence in Native American and Mayan art, dreams, the cosmos and archetypes. A less known but very strong influence was that of Joaquín Torres García, a Uruguayan artist who "in the United States was probably underrated precisely because he was so influential; Adolph Gottlieb's and Louise Nevelson's debt to his work has never been fully acknowledged".