Jackie Ferrara, the New York–based sculptor known for her towering wooden sculptures, died on October 22nd at 95. The artist traveled to Basel, where she participated in legal physician-assisted suicide.
“I don’t want a housekeeper,” she told the New York Times, which reported her death last week. “I never wanted anybody. I was married three times. That’s enough.”
Ferrara created geometric, temple-like sculptures that blur the line between architecture and art, using stacked wood or brick to evoke both ancient monuments and modern minimalism. Her precisely patterned structures let viewers move around them, turning simple materials into contemplative spaces.
Born in Detroit in 1929, Ferrara took art classes at the Detroit Institute of Art before attending Michigan State University. She married and had a son in Detroit, before moving, alone, to New York City in 1952. Soon after arriving in the city’s Lower East Side, she took a job at the Henry Street Playhouse, where she immersed herself in the downtown art scene. She then married jazz musician Don Ferrara.
Ferrara started making sculpture in the 1950s and ’60s; however, she destroyed most of her work from that time period. She moved to a studio on Prince Street in SoHo in 1971, where she began to create her shrine-like pyramids and towers. Sol LeWitt purchased one of her first major sculptures, B Pyramid (1974), a two-foot-tall wooden pyramid. In 1978, she created her first public sculpture, the 14-foot-tall Minneapolis Project, on the Minneapolis College of Art and Design campus.
These sculptures continued to increase in size throughout her life. One public sculpture, Stepped Tower (2000), stands 60 feet tall on the University of Minneapolis campus. Elsewhere, Ferrara created large-scale geometric mosaics, such as Alex’s Place (2009), an 11,240-square-foot plaza designed with architect M. Paul Friedberg on the Tufts University campus.
In 2022, Ferrara presented a solo show with Franklin Parrasch in New York. Other solo exhibitions were mounted by The Drawing Center in New York, Frederieke Taylor in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., among others.
