Berta Walker Gallery is thrilled to present Penelope Jencks’ intimate sculptures following her amazing show of grand-scale sculpture which recently closed at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Berta Walker Gallery will premiere bronze “Dunescapes ” completed specifically for this exhibition, as well as introduce a collection of earlier figurative sculptures created by Jencks in the 1990s. These are small (3”-8”) bronze nudes, intimately grouped at the beach playing, disrobing, walking, indicating the sense of awe, the vulnerability and the freedom Penelope Jencks felt as a child.Penelope Jencks’ is a world renowned sculptor best known for her impressive monumental scale granite & bronze sculpture commissions of Eleanor Roosevelt and Robert Frost; she is a working sculptor whose career spans more than forty years, and has proven to be Provincetown’s sleeper sculptor of the year. Her impressive exhibition of colossal nine- and ten-foot plaster sculpture figures at last found a site worthy of their ambitious scale and keenly observed humanity in the exquisite new galleries of the PAAM. The show impressed, surprised, and inspired the entire town and Outer Cape with its beauty, humble realism, courage, perspective, and intensity. While Jencks has exhibited in New York and Boston, and participated in several museum exhibitions, and received numerous awards, residencies, and commissions, this premiere exhibition at Berta Walker Gallery will be her first “intimate-scale” Gallery show in over twenty years.

The exhibition at PAAM originated at Boston University College of Fine Arts, School of Visual Arts, traveled to the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and is now on view at Swarthmore College in PA. It is accompanied by a major catalogue with essays by: Wendy Doniger, Hayden Herrera, and Jonathan Shahn.

Jencks’ sculpture relates to her experiences growing up with a family of intellectuals and artists who shed their clothing at the beach. “Not that they “flaunted” their nudity,” she says, rather, ”they were simply more comfortable. We would walk far enough up the beach so as not to offend. My parents and their friends considered it more “natural” to swim or lie around on the beach without any clothes to hinder them. So once out of sight, they would shed their clothing and carry on with their intellectual wranglings about Beauty & Truth.” 

Continuing, Jencks says, “I remember noticing as a tiny child how odd and different these monumental bodies were from my own more streamlined, tidy version. As a child, the beach was a magical place to me. We spent the summers in Wellfleet. The shape of the land, with its curves and dips, were like the forms of a large human body. As children, it was as though we lived on a big shapely body that we could walk on, dig in, and pick flowers from. The sea the sky and the dunes were our constants.” 

Art historian & critic Hayden Herrera grew up with Jencks, and wrote about their youth on the Cape: “A group of Cape Cod families had frequent beach gatherings at which the adults wore no clothes. For the children, the anticipation of these events was exciting: because our parents were busy with writing, painting, or composing music, most of the time we were left to our own devices…Privacy, creativity and individualism were the order of the day…Over the years, the young people became like a tribe. We knew a lot about each other, but very little about that other tribe, the grownups – except what they looked like naked, which we did not want to know.“

Describing the small bronze sculpture groupings, Wendy Doniger writes: “The figures are tinier even than those small bronzes she has made all along as models for the colossal figures…these figures, by contrast with earlier beach series and the large bronze groups, really are together, in close human contact: the woman is caught as she falls, the pair of swimmers are holding hands, the man is asking the woman an ‘Unanswered Question’ (a reference to a piece by Charles Ives).”

Jonathan Shahn noted: “This prolific and powerful artist has a long experience and great mastery in using fired clay and bronze in numerous large-scale, even monumental, works, yet is also able to use the same materials in a most intimate and sensitive way,”

Penelope Jencks started her studies in art history at Swarthmore College. “But,” she reveals to Ann Wood in The Provincetown Banner, “I decided I would rather make art than study it”. Between her Swarthmore years, Jencks studied with Hans Hofmann, then continued her artistic pursuits at Skowhegan, Boston University (BFA), Boston Museum School and Stuttgart Kunst Akademie.

Fellowships and awards include: Agop Agopoff Prize for Sculpture (2005) and Meisner Prize for Sculpture (2001), both from the National Academy of Design; Distinguished Alumni Award, School of Visual Arts, Boston University; Henry Hering Memorial Medal and Prize for Outstanding Cooperation between Architect & Sculptor, National Sculpture Society; MacDowell Colony Residencies in ’75, ’76, ’78; “Commendation for Design Excellence,” NEA; Massachusetts Artists Foundation Award, Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship, Centro Studi Ligure. Jencks has received many major sculpture commissions including: “Robert Frost” for Amherst College; “Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial”, Riverside Park, NYC; “Family Group”, Readers Digest, “Danbury Family”, Art in Public Spaces at the Courthouse, Danbury, CT; ”Student”, Farber Library, Brandeis University; “Family”, Portside Festival Park, Toledo, OH; “Samuel Eliot Morison,” Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA; “Chelsea Conversation”, Chelsea, MA.

Article from Boston Globe

Copland sculpture to greet Tanglewood’s 2011 season

CLASSICAL NOTES

July 01, 2011 - By David Weininger, Globe Correspondent

Past and present always intermingle at a venerable, large-scale festival like Tanglewood. The area’s preeminent summer music destination — whose Boston Symphony offerings get underway next weekend — changes each year, as new faces make debuts and leave their own impressions, and a new crop of students visit the Tanglewood Music Center to absorb musical wisdom from the center’s faculty. And yet a sense of history is everywhere, even in the names that adorn its structures: the Koussevitzky Music Shed, Ozawa Hall, the Leonard Bernstein Pavilion, the Aaron Copland Library. The past is always present, everywhere you walk.
As Tanglewood approaches its 75th anniversary, to be observed next year, the BSO is embarking on a mission to make its history even more visible. One part of that effort is the installation of a sculpture of Aaron Copland, one of the earliest members of the composition faculty of what was known in 1940 as the Berkshire Music Center. After Copland’s death in 1990, his ashes were scattered near the top of the Tanglewood lawn. The statue was scheduled to be unveiled yesterday near the same spot.                                                                                                            

The sculpture is a gift of another Tanglewood VIP — composer and conductor John Williams. According to material provided by the BSO, the idea came about through discussions with former trustee chair Ed Linde, and continued with his widow, Joyce, after Linde’s death in 2010. The Copland sculpture was created by Penelope Jencks. It was Jencks’s sculpture of Eleanor Roosevelt in New York’s Riverside Park — one of her best-known works — that convinced Williams to invite her to undertake the project.
Jencks was an apt choice: Her father was noted composer Gardner Jencks, she grew up in a highly musical household, and she admires Copland’s music. But it was Copland’s physical attributes that provided the true spark for her creation.
“His head is extraordinary,’’ she said by phone earlier this week. Jencks used copies of many photographs from the BSO’s archive and videotapes of Copland conducting in her research. The “dramatic’’ shape of his head, with its high hairline, made her subject “a sculptor’s dream. And that kind of led everything to where it needed to go.’’
The bronze sculpture centers on that striking physiognomy, portraying him from the middle of his chest to the top of his head. It measures about 24 inches high by 15 inches wide and sits on a granite base that brings it to a height of just over 6 feet, Jencks estimates. She demurred when asked whether she wanted a viewer to take away a particular impression of Copland from her work.
“The dialogue that goes on between the artist and the work is a kind of private dialogue,’’ she said. “I don’t like to try to make it into words. So the answer is, you really have to see it to see what you think about it. And hopefully you’ll get some understanding of who Aaron Copland was.’’
Jencks is at work on the other two sculptures in this project, of Bernstein and Koussevitzky. No date has been set for their completion.

David Weininger can be reached at globeclassicalnotes@gmail.com.