Jackie Ferrara Exhibition

Franklin Parrasch Gallery

[Image: Jackie Ferrara "A185 A 1 1/4x V-1 1/4, V-XF 1 1/4" (1977)]

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Franklin Parrasch Gallery presents its first solo exhibition of works by New York-based artist Jackie Ferrara (B. 1929, Detroit, MI). Included in this exhibition are four of the artist’s iconic wood sculptures spanning from 1978-2008, and a more recent series of encoded, color pencil diptych drawings on uniquely-formulated paper that the artist determined collaboratively with a Federal currency paper maker.

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.

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).