Paper, Wood, and Steel: Willard Boepple

Willard Boepple (b. 1945, Bennington, Vermont) is an American sculptor and printmaker known for rigorously abstract yet deeply human constructions in wood, aluminum, resin, and steel. Boepple grew up in California, where he first began making art in his teens. He studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Rhode Island School of Design, earning his BFA from City College of New York. After assisting Isaac Witkin at Bennington College, he taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and later established studios in New York and Vermont. 

Influenced by the late Anthony Caro and grounded in the modernist lineage of Picasso, González, and David Smith, Boepple has developed a personal sculptural vocabulary rooted in the additive logic of joinery and the human relationship to structure. His art registers the scale of the human body and its ordinary operations, creating works that, though abstract, remain connected to human presence. Often described as “musical” and “polyphonic,” his sculptures invite viewers to move around them and to experience their unfolding logic in time and space. There is always a sense of implied movement, as if each form were caught in the midst of a gesture, yet every piece strives toward a condition of “rightness,” a poised equilibrium between tension and resolution. 

Boepple’s major series, Ladders, Shelves, Looms, Temples, Towers, Rooms, and Trestles, begin from simple structural premises and evolve through variation, folding, and recomposition. The Ladders transform function into rhythm and ascent; Little Rhum (1989), for instance, turns the ladder motif into a syncopated climb, with evenly spaced uprights that read as rhythm as much as structure, placing it firmly within Ladders. From that measured cadence, the work moves to Shelves, which treat containment as a sculptural idea, holding space rather than objects and setting the stage for Looms; in Pony (2025), interlaced slats form a taut open grid that turns the weave itself into a spatial framework. Temples gather this clarity inward, compact and contemplative, while Towers lift it into vertical poise; Backstay (2014) rises through stacked members that stabilize as they ascend. Rooms articulate thresholds between architecture and abstraction, and Trestles extend the language toward motion, where engineered order inclines toward the organic. Together, the series balances clarity and complexity, discipline and intuition, precision and lyrical unpredictability. 

Boepple has, since the early 1990s, used translucent resin and color as active structural agents, allowing light to reveal inner geometry and spatial rhythm. His parallel printmaking practice, developed from 2004 with the late master printer Kip Gresham in Cambridge, England, extends these concerns through layered monoprints that “build with color.” In 2023, the Shards series was presented by Upsilon Gallery, New York, as an online viewing room, a group of wall mounted reliefs that merge sculpture and print and intensify the dialogue among structure, color, and perception.  

Boepple was elected to the National Academy in 2010 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 2001. He has also served on the boards of the National Academy of Design and the Vermont Studio Center. His monograph Willard Boepple: The Sense of Things (Lund Humphries, 2014), with essays by Karen Wilkin and a foreword by Michael Fried, offers the most comprehensive study of his work, situating it within modernist abstraction while underscoring his distinct contribution. 

Collections, Honors, and Institutional Presence 

Boepple’s work is represented in numerous major public and private collections. Among them: 

Recent Exhibitions and Developments