Art by Marsha Pels

Pels is an American sculptor who's worked for decades in bronze, welded steel, cast crystal, and glass, informally mentored early on by Louise Bourgeois and later by feminist artist Joan Semmel. Her 1995 installation Terranova responded directly to a miscarriage she experienced during the catastrophic 1993 Iowa floods, using floating umbrellas, cast-crystal infant figures, and neon shaped into umbilical cords, a piece she revisited three decades later with "Terranova Redux" at a Los Angeles gallery in 2026. She won the Prix de Rome for Sculpture in the mid-1980s and later used a Fulbright fellowship to research Holocaust memorials in Germany, work that shows up in the memorial-adjacent weight of much of her later sculpture.