Beverly Pepper: Precarious Balance
Upper Gallery and Outdoors

September 8 - November 12, 2021

Exhibition Catalog

"I have always been interested in precarious balance, because it is also what life is about."
Beverly Pepper

Our exhibition spans Beverly Pepper's entire career, with her earliest sculptures from 1960 through some of her final monumental works. Precarious Balance includes stainless steel sculptures from 1968, which are 9 inches tall and weigh 3 pounds, through Octavia, a late masterpiece, which stands over 11 feet tall and weighs 12 tons.

Taking a cue from Pepper’s longstanding interest in science, nature, and outdoor sculpture, we have installed many of the works both in the Upper Gallery and in the surrounding landscape.

"It’s as if the painter and sculptor in her were suddenly working at once, testing form against pattern, the made against the raw, the earth and sky themselves as they appear in reflection."
Jorie Graham

"In a certain light the sculpture appears to absorb the landscape or the landscape absorbs the sculpture. The essential attempt was to have a continuity between the work and the environment, the environment and the work.”
Beverly Pepper

Zoom / Phyllis Tuchman and Jorie Graham

We were thrilled to host a Zoom conversation on Beverly Pepper with Phyllis Tuchman and Jorie Graham on October 13.

Phyllis Tuchman is one of the foremost scholars on Beverly Pepper and was a longtime friend of the artist. Tuchman has published monographs on numerous artists and has previously written catalog essays for Pepper exhibitions. Tuchman is a regular contributor to publications including the New York Times, ARTnews, Artforum, and the Brooklyn Rail.

Jorie Graham is the executor of the Estate of Beverly Pepper and Pepper's daughter. Graham is the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1996.

Exhibition Walkthrough