Beverly Pepper // Elaine Reichek

Like so many women artists, both of their own era and subsequent generations, Beverly Pepper and Elaine Reichek have followed their own instincts outside the dominant styles of their time’s major aesthetic movements, such as minimalism and conceptualism.

Pepper transitioned from painting to sculpture in the 1960s and became well known for monumental forms of iron, steel, earth, and stone, often displayed in public spaces around the world, defying the perception of sculpture as a predominantly masculine art form. (In fact, Pepper was the first artist in the 1970s to use Cor-Ten steel as a sculptural material.) The collages by Pepper on view here are closely related to her early investigations of three-dimensional forms, reminiscent of her large-scale geometric pieces of polished steel with enameled interior surfaces. The mirrored surfaces are designed to “envelop the environment,” she wrote, “so that in a certain light the sculpture appears to absorb the landscape, or the landscape absorbs the sculpture.”

Similarly, Reichek began her artistic career as a painter. She studied with Ad Reinhardt, whose defense of the purity of abstraction was a major influence. But she recognized the limitations of such formal training and began to work in other media. Since the early 1970s, Reichek has been using needle and thread in her work to conceptual ends, exemplified by her geometric abstraction on view here, Parallelograms (1977), created from sheer organdy and thread. This piece illustrates Reichek’s innovative approach to integrating craft into fine art, challenging minimalist conventions by emphasizing the artist’s hand.

Exhibited together here for their shared formal qualities, these works by Pepper and Reichek from the late 1960s and ’70s contributed to redefining artistic practices. They pushed the boundaries in their respective fields of monumental sculpture and conceptual craft, emphasizing an innovative approach to materials based on ideas.

This exhibition was curated by Andrea Inselmann, the Gale and Ira Drukier Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and supported in part by the Hartell-Cattarulla Endowment for Exhibitions.