Penelope Jencks’ work has been commissioned and shown in the United States, Europe, and India. Her best-known work is the monumental sculpture of Eleanor Roosevelt on Riverside Drive and 72nd Street, New York, which was installed in 1996. More recently, in 2007, the 10 foot high granite sculpture of Robert Frost was unveiled at Amherst College and since that time she has been working on sculptures of Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein and Serge Koussevitzky for Tanglewood in Lenox Massachusetts the first two of which were unveiled in 2011 and 2014.
She also pursues her own private work, much of which was exhibited in a 2006 Retrospective at Boston University and a large part of which traveled on to the Provincetown Art Museum and Swarthmore College.
This book contains the group called Beach Series II: plaster figures having to do with the nudity that prevailed on the beaches that her parents frequented the 1940s. She was struck, as a tiny child, by how odd and different these monumental adult bodies were from her own more streamlined, tidy version. The Beach Series II is an effort to capture this oddness, and to allow the viewer to see, hopefully even to experience, some of those same sensations that she felt as a small child when confronted by the naked otherness of the almost mythical “grownups