Beverly Penn: Weeds

Rubin and L Galleries
October 6 - December 10, 2005

Beverly Penn lived in El Paso, Texas for nine years in the 1970s and 80s, and for four of those years was a student in the Department of Art at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), where she trained as a metalsmith and sculptor and earned her BFA in 1982. Beverly Penn: Weeds includes the artist's latest sculptures, which have the type of grand presence that defines an interior space.

This exhibition was part of a series at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at UTEP that focused on presenting current work by esteemed graduates of the Department of Art. It also represented the second time in the recent past that UTEP and El Paso Museum of Art have collaborated on an exhibition, the first being Crossing Over: Photographs and New Video Installations by Willie Varela in 2002. For Penn's exhibition in El Paso, her walk-through sculpture Garden Experiments from the Edge of Paradise was installed in the Museum's Gateway Gallery and ten more modestly scaled pieces are on view at UTEP's Rubin Center. This hared exhibition illustrated an intersection in our institutions' respective missions, which is to support artists who live or have lived in this region.