Beverly Penn: Foregrounding is the first comprehensive examination of the artist’s expansive 30-year career. In a mission to call attention to botanical systems, Beverly Penn uses cast bronze to foreground the fundamental role of plants to human life and to our existence. Richly illustrated are Penn’s main bodies of work to date, which are preceded by brief insights into her individual series. The monograph includes Penn’s ongoing projects Weeds: Plexus, Weeds: Chimera, and Weeds: Fractured Landscapes, followed by the series Timelines, Taxonomy, Hybrids, and Arcadia.

Included with the plates are scholarly essays featuring curator Suzanne Ramljak and art historian Kathryn Blair Moore, and a conversational interview between Penn and botanist Tanisha M. Williams.

In Beverly Penn’s quest to foreground plants for our rapt attention, she ultimately wields aesthetic means for ethical ends. Seducing us to see what has been overlooked, she positions us to better appreciate our own lives and that of other beings.

—Suzanne Ramljak
Excerpt of "To See, or Not To See: The Art of Beverly Penn”

About the Artist

Beverly Penn is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation; The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center; Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Connemara Conservancy; Smitten Forum; and Texas Commission on the Arts. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in Barcelona, Spain; the Texas State University Presidential Seminar Award; and nine faculty grants from Texas State University involving research in Mexico, Italy, Spain, and New York. In 2017, Penn was designated a Texas State Artist for the three-dimensional category, awarded by the Texas Commission on the Arts. Penn’s sculptures are included in private and public collections including the National Museum of Women in the Arts; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Yale University Art Gallery; Racine Art Museum; El Paso Museum of Art; Moody Foundation; and has numerous commissions for public art projects. Penn is a Texas Master Naturalist and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Texas State University.

www.beverlypenn.com