In 1960, at the age of 36, the painter Beverly Pepper took her ten-year-old daughter to Angkor Wat, Cambodia, amid a climate of fomenting internal unrest. “We were both very lucky, because that trip could have killed us,” she would later say. The American-born, Rome-based artist would spend more than a week in the temple complex, observing how its stone reliefs and statuaries intersected with the roping banyan trees that grew around and through them. She considered how the trees, whose limbs punctured the tensile surfaces of these carvings, instead of obscuring their imagery articulated its contours, situating the depictions within a nexus of inner and outer. Shortly after, Pepper made a startlingly rapid shift from painting to sculpture. She returned from Cambodia to Italy and immediately set upon transforming the felled trees outside of her house into the twist- ing dendroidal forms of her rst sculptures, including 1961’s Laocoön, in which hollowed elm links intermingled with a mass of spidery strands of carved marble. That Pepper’s watershed exhibition, The Quest and the Quarry, took shape in a medium in which she had never previously worked (beyond a sole course in industrial design at Pratt College) is indic- ative of the conviction and tenacity of this singular artist. . .