MASA

Happy birthday to one of the most radical and quietly revolutionary direct metal artists of our time, Ana Pellicer.

Pellicer was not simply a sculptor. She was a builder of ecosystems: material, cultural, ecological. Her practice collapsed the artificial divide between contemporary art and artisanal knowledge. Copper, in her hands was political, it was ancestral, it was alive.

She studied plastic arts at The Art Students League and The New School in New York, absorbing a modernist vocabulary before making the decisive move back to Mexico. In Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán — a town shaped by its pre-Hispanic coppersmithing lineage — she apprenticed with sculptor James Metcalf and submitted herself to the discipline of the forge. She became one of the very few contemporary artists to truly master direct metalworking through traditional techniques, and then with a vision to expand them.

For more than five decades in Santa Clara del Cobre, Pellicer was a catalytic force. In 1973, alongside Metcalf, she co-founded the Adolfo Best Maugard School of Arts and Techniques, formalising technical training and, radically for its time, opening the field of coppersmithing to women.
This was not symbolic inclusion; it shifted the town’s social and economic fabric. Her sculptural and jewelry works draw from Mesoamerican cosmologies — the rain god’s copper axe, the ritual rubber ball game. The works functioned as propositions: what does it mean to rearm myth within contemporary space?

Among her most emblematic interventions was La Joyería de la Libertad (Jewelry for the Statue of Liberty), a monumental copper works in scale conceived for the centenary of the Statue of Liberty. The pieces were first presented at the World Trade Center in New York before travelling internationally — a gesture that inverted hierarchies between centre and periphery, craft and monument, adornment and power.

For the last three decades of her life, Pellicer quietly reforested the Mesa de San Miguel above Santa Clara del Cobre, planting cedar, pine, and oak, restoring what had been eroded. Today it stands as a recognised ecological reserve.

Happy birthday, you are dearly missed!

This incredibly delicious Shifted Rubber Pink, 001 light by Brian Thoreen was specially commissioned for .
The light is a permanent installation at Rosetta, alongside two other lights gracing the restaurant’s top floor.

BRIAN THOREEN
Shifted Rubber Pink, 001, 2026
Pink rubber, brass, LED
400 x 110 x 30 cm
157 1/2 x 43 1/4 x 11 3/4 in

For inquires [email protected]

Photography Studio Brian Thoreen.

MASA wishes a very happy birthday to Su Wu, our ongoing collaborator and curator. May you have the most wonderful celebrations and a beautiful Year of the Horse ahead 🎈