# @hyperallergic on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DQmvHBbAF5U
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/36592590-hyperallergic-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/fc5beb3482.jpg
- **Posted:** 2025-11-03T18:59:51.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Hyperallergic (@hyperallergic) — https://gondola.cc/hyperallergic

## Caption

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, basswood, and birch — in the early 1970s. Over the next several decades, dozens of major museums acquired her work, and she completed monumental commissions across the country: an amphitheater for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a tiled floor for the Pittsburgh International Airport, and mosaics for the Grand Central subway station, to name only a few.

To read Zoë Lescaze’s obituary for Jackie Ferrara, visit the link in bio. 

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1 - Jackie Ferrara in New York on February 13, 2025 (all photos courtesy the Jackie Ferrara Foundation)

2 - Jackie Ferrara, “Corridor Watch” (1996), temporary installation at Michael Klein Gallery, New York

3, 4 - Jackie Ferrara, “266 Stone Court” (1988) at the General Mills Sculpture Garden in Minneapolis

#JackieFerrara #Sculpture #Geometry

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## Tags

sculpture, geometry, jackieferrara

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