For Students

Outdoor Sculpture: Beverly Pepper

Beverly Pepper
United States, born 1924
Ternary Marker
Cast bronze
Gift of Jack A. and Noreen Rounick, 2003/2.78

3. Beverly Pepper

In the late 1950’s Beverly Pepper, who had trained as a painter, began to experiment with sculpture. In the decades that followed, she produced a body of work that is remarkably varied, ranging from intimate tabletop sculptures to monumental outdoor works and site-specific environmental projects that merge with the landscape. During the 1980s her sculptural style emphasized surface treatment and machine-tooled production. Her affinity for the shape and form of industrial equipment stems from years spent in factories fabricating her own sculpture.

Ternary Marker is part of a series of sculptures Pepper has called “urban altars,” which combine a totemic presence with simple archetypal forms. The title alludes to its three main parts: a pyramid and inverted triangle capped by a wedge shape reminiscent of an ancient tool or ritual object. The cumulative effect of these geometric shapes is somehow anthropomorphic. Pepper’s “urban altars” are a kind of archaeological minimalism that maintains a vital dialogue between past and present, primitive and industrial.