Mexican Sculptor Dies at 79

Ana Pellicer, a sculptor beloved in her home country of Mexico for her copper creations, has died at 79. Mexico’s culture ministry announced her death this week but did not state a cause.

Pellicer has received international praise in the past decade for the jewelry she made for the Statue of Liberty, which was gifted by France to the United States in 1876. To mark the 100th anniversary of that gift, Pellicer created enormous amulets, necklaces, and more that were exhibited as sculptures in their own right. The jewelry towers over viewers, acting as symbols of femininity to be both feared and admired.

Though Pellicer finished creating those sculptures in 1986, she did not gain international recognition for them until 2017, when they appeared at the Mexico City gallery House of Gaga. The next year, her work appeared at MoMA PS1 in New York in a show called “Body Armor” that featured her 36-foot-tall necklace for Lady Liberty.

Born in 1946 in Mexico City, Pellicer was not widely known beyond her home country for much of her career because her late husband, the sculptor James Metcalf, tended gain more notice. Part of the reason for that was her collaborative work with Metcalf, so her authorship was not always clearly defined.

Together, starting in 1976, they trained female artisans in the town of Santa Clara del Cobre in ancient copper and craft techniques indigenous to the region. Their work effectively was a social art project unto itself, and the place where the education was administered was even given a name: Centro de Acción Educativa. The women who trained there then worked alongside Pellicer to help her create her monumental sculptures.

Contemporary writers have criticized that school. “Fighting for women’s rights and the preservation of tradition is, of course, admirable,” wrote Devon Van Houten Maldonado in a 2017 Hyperallergic review. “But the work isn’t made better or more meaningful because of the artist’s participation in an idealist, constructivist project in the small town of Michoacan.”

Pellicer’s own practice was also devoted to resuscitating millennia-old mythologies. In 1992, for New York’s Lincoln Center, she remade what the New York Times described as “a large-scale sculptural interpretation of the ancient ball games, complete with 300-pound balls.”

She also directed her attention toward more recent Mexican culture, building costumes for the actress, poet, and painter Nahui Ollin for one performance staged in the late ’90s. Pellicer’s copper works for Ollin look more like armor than they do dresses.

In its X post about Pellicer, Mexico’s culture ministry wrote, “Ana Pellicer’s work strengthened folk art and transformed the way art is linked to tradition and social justice in Mexico.”