Jackie Ferrara facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Jackie Ferrara
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Ferrara in 2012
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| Born |
Jacqueline Hirschhorn
November 17, 1929 Detroit, Michigan, U.S.
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| Education | Michigan State University |
| Known for | Sculpture |
| Movement | Postminimalism |
Jackie Ferrara (born Jacqueline Hirschhorn, November 17, 1929) is an American sculptor and draughtswoman best known for her pyramidal stacked structures. Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, The Phillips Collection, and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, among others.
Biography
Ferrara was born in Detroit, Michigan on November 17, 1929. She studied at Michigan State University for six months in 1950, but otherwise had little formal arts education. She moved to New York City in 1952 and became involved in the city's burgeoning art scene. She worked temporarily for the Henry Street Playhouse, and there became involved with theatre and dance. During the 1960s, Ferrara was involved with performances and happenings at the Judson Memorial Church. She performed in two of Claes Oldenburg's happenings. ..... The production featured performances by Candy Darling (in the English-language version) and Magaly Alabau (in the Spanish-language version).
During this time she began sculpting, initially "having affinities with Minimalist sculpture" then developing her own style by the 1970s. Between the late 1950s and early 1970s, Ferrara's sculptures "included wax figures in groups, constructed boxes with macabre contents, and hanging pieces, such as tail-like objects of jute and canvas panels covered with cotton batting and hung in rows." Ferrara had solo exhibitions in New York in 1973 and 1974, and established her major sculptural direction:
Characteristics of Ferrara's work include wooden pyramid or ziggurat structures with accompanying horizontally stacked steps, "meticulous craftmanship... reference to generic types of non-Western building, such as those of Mesoamerica and Egypt, and to geometric form." She further experimented with cutting away sections and moved away from having four identical sides on her pyramids. Some of Ferrara's exhibitions included her graph paper drawings, "testifying to her methods of elaboration." One of her earliest mature works was 1974's "Hollow Core Pyramid".
Other well-known works of the period include "Curved Pyramid" and "Stacked Pyramid", both 1973. In the 1980s, Ferarra began working on a smaller scale, producing plywood works she called "wallyards" or "courtyards" that looked like models rather than finished sculptures. Another series of small works, which Ferrara referred to as "places," grew out of these works. Many look like small-scale models of temples, yet defy "specific historical dating... seeming simultaneously ancient, modern and even futuristic in some cases".
Since the 1980s, Ferrara's work has shifted to commissions for outdoor settings. Her "public environments" in the 1980s and 1990s "deal primarily with surface – floor areas, walkways and platforms – and the arrangement of geometric patterns... Ferrara has favoured the use of tiles (granite, slate and terracotta, for example) to compose such elements as chequerwork, triangle and bands of various sizes that traverse space in sometimes unpredictable directions."
Public works
Large-scale public works Ferrara has created include "Castle Clinton: Tower and Bridge" (1979) and "Meeting Place" (1989), which featured a large "lobby" with concrete and steel flooring, a raised platform with steps, and concrete and steel seating. In 1988, she created the work "Belvedere" at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.
Other public works include the 250 seat "Amphitheater" (1999) at LACMA, the sixty-foot-high "Stepped Tower" (2000) at the University of Minnesota, and the 60-foot-long red and black granite "Fountain" (2006) at University of Houston.
Awards and grants
- Creative Artists Public Service grants, New York State Council on the Arts: 1971 and 1975
- National Endowment for the Arts grants: 1973, 1977, 1987
- Guggenheim Fellowship, 1976
- Design Excellence Award for Flushing Bay Promenade, Queens, New York City, Art Commission of the City of New York, 1988
- Institute Honor, American Institute of Architects, 1990
Personal life
Ferrara married jazz musician Don Ferrara (second marriage) in 1955; they separated in 1957. Ferrara lived in Tuscany in 1959/1960.
