Persephone Unbound

Photo: Paul Macapia

Persephone Unbound

1999

Beverly Pepper

American, 1924 - 2020

For ancient civilizations a well-positioned stone created a connection to the cosmos, and left vital evidence of a human presence. A similar sense of timelessness and gravity is evoked by Beverly Pepper's monolithic Persephone Unbound. Persephone, Queen of the underworld, was abducted by Hades; when a rescue effort failed Hades fed her a pomegranate and she was bound to the underworld for a third of each year. Persephone Unbound suggests the ideal of freedom, while at the same time embodying the unchanging eternity to which Persephone was subjected.
Cast bronze
122 x 31 1/2 x 21 in. (309.9 x 80 x 53.3 cm)
Gift of Jon and Mary Shirley
2009.14
Provenance: Marlborough Chelsea, New York, NY; Jon and Mary Shirley, Medina, WA, June 2, 1999-2009
Photo: Paul Macapia
location
Now on view at the Olympic Sculture Park

I wish to make an object that has a powerful presence, but is at the same time inwardly turned, seeming capable of intense self-absorption.

Beverly Pepper

Resources

Exhibition HistoryNew York, New York, "Beverly Pepper, recent sculpture: Forms of Memory II", Marlborough Chelsea, April 10 - May 15, 1999
Published ReferencesCorrin, Lisa Graziose et al. "Olympic Sculpture Park." Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum, 2007, illus. p. 53

England, Alice H., et al. "Assessing the Protective Quality of Wax Coatings on Bronze Sculptures Using Hydrogel Patches in Impedance Measurements." PDXScholar: Coatings 6, no. 4 (2016): p. 3, reproduced fig. a.

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