The artist Jackie Ferrara, who died last week in Basel, Switzerland, at the age of 95, liked to describe herself as a methodical drone. A lover of numbers, lists, and the stark economy of Morse code, she only ever began building her sculptures after meticulously plotting them out on graph paper. She planned her death with the same dispassionate logic. Ferrara was neither terminally ill nor in unbearable pain when she booked a one-way trip to Pegasos, a Swiss nonprofit specializing in physician-assisted deaths. It was the prospect of losing her independence she found intolerable. “It’s not good,” she told zoelescaze when they met this summer. “I mean, do you want to end up in bed with a bedpan? I gotta get outta here before that happens.” Born in Detroit in 1929, Ferrara achieved a rare level of renown for a woman artist of her generation. Entirely self-taught, she arrived at her mature work — geometric structures she built by stacking strips of plywood and planks of poplar, pine, ba...