Jackie Ferrara was born in Detroit, Michigan, later moving to New York and settling into the SoHo artists scene early on, where she continues to live and work. She developed her post-minimalist style beginning in the 1970’s, and is known for creating pyramidal or ziggurat sculptures, working with geometric patterns in often log cabin-like stacked configurations of wood. Ferrara is also a highly accomplished draftsperson, typically working on graph paper or wall drawings procedurally through the elaboration of formal rules. Her work blends or synthesizes various formal approaches, genres, and styles, interacting with conceptual rule-based practices, pattern and design, architecture, and minimalism.

While Ferrara did not start making art with any regularity until her 40’s, she has had an extensive career, winning numerous grants and awards including from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has consistently made significant contributions to the recognition of women in the arts. During a period when the Whitney Museum was regularly being protested regarding its lack of inclusion of women artists in its exhibitions, Ferrara was included in its 1970 sculpture annual, and would later be included in two of its biennials in 1973 and 1979. She had her first one person show in 1973 at A.M. Sachs Gallery, where her work was bought by the then well-known conceptual artist Sol Lewitt (with whom she also used to play poker). Following this, Lewitt’s dealer Max Protetch would encounter her work and from then Ferrara began to exhibit with his gallery. Her sculpture has been most influential in the public domain where she continues to produce large-scale works with an attentiveness to place at renowned institutions across the United States. Her public art projects have been honored by institutions including The American Institute of Architects, American Society of Landscape Architects and the Design Art Commission of the City of New York. Her 1997 mosaic work Arches, Towers, Pyramids is installed in 5 locations at Grand Central Station, including the platform walls of the shuttle to Times Square, the corridor for the #7 train and at an entrance to the main terminal.

Jackie Ferrara’s career as a sculptor began in New York City in the early 1970s, a period in which the theory of “the death of painting” was the prevailing cultural dialogue, and the door was kicked wide open for artists to explore new and yet-invented mediums. Ferrara’s art extended the bounds of traditional sculpture into the interactive, public sphere. Creating monumental structures, many of which were designed to be physically engaged with, Ferrara changed the language of sculptural experience.

Modularity is a core element in Ferrara’s formal approach. Her employ of pattern-, language-, and volume-based modalities derive from an intrinsic human attraction to ancestral ziggurat and pyramidal shapes. Ferrara engages a repetitious or iterative approach to her work. Her colored pencil-and-ink works on paper, for example, which depict spaces and places informed by our world but evade specific identification, contain embedded Morse code references relaying visual and atmospheric links. In Ferrara’s sculptures, units of pine, maple, birch, and poplar woods are cut and constructed into arenas, bath houses, and tower-like structures.

In an essay from Ferrara’s 1992 retrospective exhibition catalogue, art historian Nancy Princenthal wrote, “Ferrara’s sensibility is rooted in order as a pleasure principle. To appreciate her work is to share her joy in systems of organization, their multiplicity, and their permutations … The sensations she wants to recapture and share are imprecise and intimate.” Along with contemporaries such as Alice Aycock, Scott Burton, Nancy Holt, and Mary Miss, Ferrara’s works have come to redefine the inclusion of the environment within contemporary art.

This show marks Jackie Ferrara’s first solo exhibition at Franklin Parrasch Gallery, subsequent to the artist joining the Gallery in 2021. Her work was previously included in a Franklin Parrasch Gallery group exhibition entitled Benched in 1993.

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Jackie Ferrara has produced numerous public monumental, site-specific projects internationally, including those in Toronto (Ontario), New York, NY, and St. Paul, MN; and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), Tufts University (Medford, MA), and the State University of New York at Purchase (Purchase, NY). Ferrara’s works reside in the permanent collections of over 60 museums and public collections worldwide, including the Louisiana Museum (Humlebaek, Denmark), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), and High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA). Most recently, Ferrara’s works were included in exhibitions at the New Britain Museum of American Art, Steel, String, Spit Bite: Selections from the LeWitt Collection (November 12, 2021-March 18, 2022), and Menil Drawing Institute, Dream Monuments: Drawings from the 1960s and 1970s (May 21-September 19, 2021).

Courtesy of Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York