previews
“Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde”
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum
Philadelphia
Philadelphia
}
}
}
PRINT September 2019
STEELED HEART
Annie Godfrey Larmon
BEVERLY PEPPER’S TENSILE, totemic sculptures often register an acute sense of contingency. Over her nearly six-decade-long career—which has evaded recognition commensurate with her contributions to the development of public sculpture since its proliferation in the 1970s—the American-born, Italy-based artist has bodied forth a semiotics of flux, one playing out everywhere from the precarious angles of her cantilevered steel to her mutable surfaces of rusted iron.
Already established as a painter, Pepper turned to sculpture in 1960, following a transformative visit to Angkor Wat, where the sinewy