Jackie Ferrara, a New York–based artist known for stacked-wood sculptures, traveled to Basel, Switzerland, to end her life via physician-assisted suicide. She died on October 22 at age 95, according to a report in the New York Times. She told the Times that she had fallen twice in the past year, and did not want to be dependent on anyone.
Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland (with or without the participation of a physician) and does not require that the person in question be terminally ill. (Medical aid in dying, as it is often called, is legal in several states in the US, though the patient must be terminally ill.)
Ferrara grew up in Detroit, and moved to New York in 1952, when she was in her 20s, leaving her son and her first husband behind. She had been active in the downtown New York art world for over half a century. Ferrara often used organic materials like wood to make her pyramids, staircases, obelisks, and other stacked geometric structures stand out from her Minimalist peers, who were more likely to work with sleek materials like steel and concrete.
Ferrara’s work is in the collection of several major museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. Her most recent solo show was at Franklin Parrasch in New York in 2022, her first with the gallery.
During a 2017 talk with her friend, the painter Mimi Gross, at the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation in New York, Ferrara reminisced about her transition from working with cotton batting and glue-soaked cardboard to wood.
“There used to be a place on Greene Street that made the quilted blankets that they put around furniture when you move,” she said. “Inside was this stuff, which I called cotton batting, but it was really a bunch of rags that had been pulverized.”
In the early 1970s, Ferrara bought a loft on Prince Street, which also impacted her choice of materials: “Around here in the neighborhood you could find wood, so I switched from cardboard to wood. Then one day, I was putting together pieces of wood and trying to figure out what I was going to make and I thought, Why am I covering this with cotton batting?’”
