Artwork Details
- Title
- Phaedrus
- Artist
- Beverly Pepper (1922 – 2020)
- Year
- 1974; installed 1977
- Medium
- Painted steel
- Dimensions
- Height 19′; width 8′
Artwork Description
“I have always been interested in precarious balance,” Beverly Pepper has said, “because it is also what life is about.” She applied this principle to Phaedrus, a 12-ton sculpture that thrusts from the ground at an implausible, gravity-defying angle. Made of 13 steel plates painted white, Phaedrus was completed in 1976 and installed in November 1977 under the artist’s supervision.
Along with Alexander Calder’s White Cascade, Phaedrus was commissioned for the new Federal Reserve Bank building as part of the Redevelopment Authority’s Percent for Art program. In 1975 she explained her sculptures of that era in the following words: “I wish to make an object that has a powerful physical presence, but is at the same time inwardly turned, seeming capable of intense self-absorption.”
Content on this page was adapted from Public Art in Philadelphia by Penny Balkin Bach (Temple University Press, 1992). Bach was the longtime Executive Director of the Association for Public Art, working with the organization from 1980 to 2022.
Artwork Credits
Commissioned by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority
Owned by the Federal Reserve Bank