The Met's ongoing "Manet/Velasquez: The French Taste for Spanish Art" features masterpiece after masterpiece of the European painting canon and should not be missed. Some lesser known ongoing shows include "Christian Schad and Neue Sachlichkeit" at the wonderful Neue Galerie and an exhibit of Edwin Dickinson at the National Academy Museum.

Rites of Passage V (1972-73); bronze. Photo by Don Hunstein

But almost hidden among all the hubbub is a show you might easily miss: a very beautiful exhibition of sculpture made over a period of 30 years by the Bronx-born, New York-based sculptor Ann Sperry.

Sperry's work provides an antidote to an era of destructiveness, transporting us into a world of positive, hopeful, creative energy. Indeed, much of it refers to Creation itself, be it the Garden of Eden, her own fertility during the time she was pregnant, or the fecundity of nature.

Sperry works in the interstices between creation and destruction. Her chosen medium, welded steel, has been primarily associated with male aggressiveness during the 20th century. As far back as 1929, Picasso and Julio Gonzalez innovated the use of large pieces of welded steel to make constructions and assemblages. David Smith, one of America's greatest sculptors, took up the medium and created some of the most powerful, volcanic sculpture ever. Others, such as Sperry's teacher, Theodore Roszak, further developed these ideas. But Sperry uses welded steel in an entirely new way. She cuts and shapes it, often painting it soft colors. At one point, she painted her works pale pink. You want to touch them to feel their softness; it does not seem possible that they are made of steel. This very act shocked many male sculptors, some of whom took offense at her subversion of steel into a feminine medium.

The Creation: Seven Days (1985-86); steel.

Throughout her work there are underpinnings of rhythm and musicality; indeed, anyone who has written about her work has noted this. She has brought music into the foreground in her recent, poignantly moving series, My Piano. Three pieces from this series are in the current show, and more than a dozen others were recently exhibited at the Kraushaar Gallery on 57th Street.

To look chronologically at a few examples from the present exhibition, we can start with the Fertility Series from the 1970s. In these she used rounded and oval forms to suggest seeds, eggs, and babies through abstract means. Sperry used wax and casting to build up these forms. From 1975 to 1977 she returned to the technique of welding, but used it in a new and different way. Cutting the steel into thin ribbons or into eggshell-like shapes, she painted them pink, titling them the Tender Flesh series. During the '80s the artist received commissions to make large, outdoor sculptures, one on Ward's Island, and later, one in Seattle. Both depicted gardens of huge, painted steel flowers. She translated these into indoor sculptures also, making "flowers" that cling to the wall (Wallflowers) and a humorous Homage to Monet, clearly referring to his waterlillies but substituting abstract shapes in steel. Also during the '80s, Sperry made a Creation series, which she showed at the Jewish Museum in New York City. Like her other works, this series, while alluding to the Bible, used abstract, freestanding sculpture rather than literal figures. Creation consists of all manner of whimsical and serious anthropomorphically shaped figures appearing to move like dancers to an imaginary music.

The 1990s saw her Personal Interiors, Where Is Your Heart, and Out There series. These sculptures make use of modernist shapes (sometimes referred to as Arp-shapes or Gorky-shapes, deriving from their use by the Dadaist or the American progenitor of Abstract Expressionism) to evoke internal body organs. In some of these works, she adds new materials, such as glass, velvet, and mesh, in an effort to better portray organic forms.

My Piano 7 (2002); steel, brass, wood. Photo by Arnold Helbling

Perhaps the work most directly relevant to musicians is the recent series, titled My Piano. You do not need to know the story behind it in order to appreciate the inventive shapes and materials, but it certainly is inspirational and revealing. The artist's father had given her a piano when she was a child. She discovered, at a much later date, that he had had to go into debt in order to afford it. Although she kept the piano most of her life, it eventually became unusable as a musical instrument. So, in order to preserve it and pay tribute to her deceased father, she dismantled the instrument, combining parts of it with sculpted brass and steel. The myriad invented pieces have nothing to do with the original piano shape; the artist totally reassembled piano keys, red felt, wires, pegs, legs, and wheels into unheard-of configurations. The results are a kind of updating of Cubism in which the original is taken apart and reassembled into new configurations, which stand completely on their own. All of Ann Sperry's work is relevant to music, dance, and drama; her abstract figures appear to move in space. Her elegant, original, and finely crafted work crosses borders and disciplines, but most of all, connects to something eternal.

At a time of doubt, despair, death, and destruction, Ann Sperry's sculpture is transcendent. It is religious without being moralizing. The artist's evocative, symbolic, and metaphorical forms relate both directly and indirectly to creativity and continuity in life and beyond.

"Thirty Pieces/Thirty Years: Sculpture by Ann Sperry" can be seen at the Hebrew Union College--Jewish Institute of Religion Museum through June 26. The address is 1 West Fourth Street (between Broadway and Mercer Street). Hours are Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. and Friday, 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Admission is free.

Art historian Greta Berman has been on the liberal arts faculty since 1979.