Adrian Nivola remembers the long hours spent in the studio of his grandfather, Costantino Nivola, during the 1980s, watching the artist capture the warm embrace of a mother in a wood sculpture as the country singer Tammy Wynette crooned over the stereo.

The music and the man came rushing back into focus earlier this year as he went to work on nearly two dozen previously unseen sculptures from his grandfather’s studio that were cast from wet sand into the shapes of animals, people and abstract natural forms.