Born in Brooklyn, New York, Beverly Pepper spent most of her adult life working in Central Italy, and her work bears clear influences of the obelisks and other archaic artifacts common to the Mediterranean region. From the outset, Pepper intended all her artworks to be installed outdoors, and she was one of the first artists to incorporate industrial CorTen steel into her sculptures. 

King Ritual has precedents in Pepper’s small-scale sculptures of forged and cast iron from the late 1970s, whose forms suggest totemic figures. Her works eventually increased in size and by 1982–83 had become tall and attenuated. She explained: 

My work both responds to and tries to reinforce the human capacity for wonder, for reorienting ourselves in relation to powers or fields of force (whether internal or external), which are greater than our merely biographical or social selves. Obviously, we can’t rebuild the monuments of the ancient world, but we can aspire to re-evoke, in however modern a world, some of the enduring and perhaps renewable sensations of amazement, even awe.

Several of Pepper’s sculptures include the word “ritual” in their title, indicating the way in which she perceived their purpose. For the artist, the meaning of any one sculpture is not predetermined but created by a viewer’s face-to-face experience with it.