Biography

Beverly Pepper began her career as a painter, but turned to sculpture in 1960 after a trip to Angkor Wat, in Cambodia, where she was awed by the temple ruins surviving beneath the jungle growth. The artist made her debut in a Rome gallery with a show of carved tree trunks in 1962. When she was invited to make metal pieces for a festival in Spoleto, Pepper quickly convinced a local ironmaker to teach her how to weld. Sculpting in metal meant working in factories, a situation that the artist described as a Catch-22: A woman could not act like ​“a lady,” Pepper explained, or she would not be credible as a welder. Pepper even used the men’s room, since there were no ladies’ rooms in factories at that time. By the mid-1960s, she had mastered metalwork, constructing strings of boxlike shapes made from polished stainless steel. Later, Pepper made a series of earthbound sculptures by wedging triangular ridges in the landscape. She went on to combine abstraction and primitive forms to create what she called ​“totemic” pieces and ​“urban altars.” Even though Pepper did not like to draft models for her work, the General Services Administration’s Art-in-Architecture Program required artists to submit a maquette for design approval.