Jackie Ferrara, a sculptor who stacked lengths of wood into objects that resembled pyramids, stairways and towers, imbuing the sleek forms of Minimalism with an aura of ancient mystery, died on Wednesday in Basel, Switzerland. She was 95.
Tina Hejtmanek, her estate and legacy adviser, said Ms. Ferrara died by physician-assisted suicide.
Ms. Ferrara, long a figure on the New York art scene, said in a recent interview that though she was in good health, she had decided to end her life after falling twice in the past year, reminding her not only of her frailty but also of her dislike of dependency on other people.
“I don’t want a housekeeper,” she said with characteristic forthrightness. “I never wanted anybody. I was married three times. That’s enough.”
She traveled to Switzerland to end her life because physician-assisted suicide is illegal in the United States except when provided to the terminally ill.
Although not a household name, Ms. Ferrara was highly esteemed in the art world by critics and fellow artists. The critic Peter Schjeldahl, writing in The New York Times in 1980, called her “one of our most gifted and inventive sculptors.” One of her pieces, he said, had “the intransigent presence of a cement bunker and the winning complexity of Baroque architecture.”
Indeed, her work was an improbable combination of ruler-measured precision and quirky invention. Whether she was making a small stepped pyramid that could fit on a side table, or a kingly outdoor piece like “Amphitheater” (1999), which could seat 200 visitors at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, she remained the most craft-obsessed of Minimalists.
In an era when sculptors were turning out factory-fabricated objects with shiny metal surfaces, Ms. Ferrara prided herself on using a table saw and assembling her own sculptures from natural wood, which she left unpainted. She was, in essence, a lumberyard poet, although a casual observer might fairly assume that she found her inspiration in Aztec ruins or ancient sites like Tenochtitlan in Mexico City, with its pyramids and plazas.
In conversation, Ms. Ferrara, a contrarian with a sly charm, denied that her work was shaped by either Minimalist sculpture or Mesoamerican architecture. She spoke of her art as if it were a puzzle to be solved, a Rubik’s Cube in wood or granite.
“I have the soul of a file clerk rather than an artist,” she insisted, adding that she had no interest in art history. “Museums were never fun for me. I’m a dud.”
She was born Jacqueline Hirschhorn on Nov. 17, 1929, in Detroit. Her father, Herman Hirschhorn, was a Jewish émigré from Poland who sold restaurant equipment; her mother, Diana (Ufberg) Hirschhorn, was a bookkeeper for the City of Detroit.
As a child, Jacqueline took art classes at the Detroit Institute of Arts, an experience, she said, that underscored her lack of ability. “I don’t have that drawing gift at all,” she said.
Enrolling at Michigan State University, she was unsure of what to study but loved listening to a radio program, hosted by a disc jockey known as Symphony Sid, broadcast live from Birdland, the Manhattan jazz nightclub. Lying in bed in her dorm, as music by Miles Davis and Charlie Parker filled the room, she resolved to move to New York City as soon as possible.
That plan went awry. She remained in Michigan, dropping out of school her freshman year and marrying her college boyfriend, Olin Ross Weber. Their son was born a year later, in 1951. Overwhelmed by the demands of motherhood, she borrowed money from her brother, Austin, and took a night flight to New York in 1952. “My husband didn’t know that I had left him,” she recalled.
They divorced that year. She is survived by her son, Brit Weber, with whom she reconciled in later life; three grandchildren; and her brother.
When she arrived in Manhattan, Ms. Ferrara recalled, she lived on the Lower East Side and supported herself with a job at the Bowery Savings Bank. Before long, she was working in the office of the Henry Street Playhouse, which put her at the epicenter of the downtown art scene.
She married Don Ferrara, an accomplished jazz trumpeter from Brooklyn, in 1955. The marriage was short-lived, but Ms. Ferrara kept his surname. “Everyone thinks I am Italian,” she said. “It was certainly good when I first moved here. The lumberyards loved me.”
She studied neither art nor architecture, but she did take a class in ceramics at the Henry Street Settlement. One day, she realized that her lumpy clay object looked nothing like a bowl and hence qualified as a bona fide sculpture, a new pursuit for her.
Ms. Ferrara would later destroy most of her work from the 1950s and ’60s, deciding it was banal. That included a “figurative weirdo phase,” she said, referring to the irregularly shaped totems she made from cotton batting and hung from the ceiling on knotted ropes.
A watershed moment came in 1971, when she bought a loft on Prince Street in SoHo, borrowing $7,500 from an aunt in Michigan. She spent the next year renovating the loft herself, a kind of artistic apprenticeship. She discovered her mature style while turning a raw industrial space into a habitable home.
The effect on her artwork was immediate: She retired her soft assemblages in favor of terse geometric constructions. Although critics would attribute her breakthrough to the influence of Carl Andre, with his stack pieces, and Sol LeWitt, with his open cubes, Ms. Ferrara disagreed. When she first visited Mr. LeWitt’s studio, she recalled, it was cluttered with boxes of various materials and sizes. “I thought he was in the shipping business,” she said.
Mr. LeWitt, who was uncommonly supportive of other artists, bought her sculpture “B Pyramid” (1974) — a two-foot-tall wooden stack with improbably curved contours — for his personal collection. Max Protetch, his art dealer, spotted the piece in Mr. LeWitt’s loft and was sufficiently impressed to offer to represent Ms. Ferrara, a rarity for a female sculptor at the time.
Soon, however, seeking to escape the confines of the commercial gallery system, she turned to outdoor sculpture. In 1978, Ms. Ferrara completed her first public work, “Minneapolis Project,” a 14-foot-tall truncated pyramid for the campus of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She went on to receive dozens of commissions for public sculptures, some in small Midwestern towns overlooked by the art press.
But who can say where an appreciative viewer will turn up? Laura Owens, an acclaimed painter based in Los Angeles, grew up in a rural Ohio town that had just one memorable work of public art: Ms. Ferrara’s “Norwalk Platform” (1984), a long, low-lying, stage-like structure made of fir and set in a municipal park.
“It really influenced me,” Ms. Owens said, recalling that when she was in high school, she and her friends liked to hang out there. “It was a work of art, but it was also functional. I could walk up on it, and I thought, ‘What is this?’ It gave me permission to make confounding art.”
Ms. Ferrara’s constructions often shifted between lofty abstraction and humble functionality — especially her wood-slat chairs and benches, some of which furnished her home in SoHo. (The loft will be sold to benefit the Jackie Ferrara Foundation, which she recently started to provide grants to female artists, performers and choreographers.)
In addition to her sculpture, Ms. Ferrara produced a large body of colored-pencil-and-ink drawings that she was still tinkering with a week before her death. Each one is a secret missive, depicting abandoned buildings in her native Detroit or fragments of castle walls inscribed with lines of Morse code. Dot, dash, dot, dash — what message were they tapping out?
“During the pandemic,” Ms. Ferrara said, “some people made sourdough bread, some people wrote in their journals, and I made spooky drawings.”
She laughed and added: “My favorite holiday was always Halloween. I’m going to miss it this year.”
Deborah Solomon is an art critic and biographer who is currently writing a biography of Jasper Johns.
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