This has been Pepper’s year, beginning with a retrospective of smaller-scale early work at Los Angeles’s Kayne Griffin Corcoran: arched steel ribbons like three-dimensional brush strokes; polished stainless steel boxes that reflect their surroundings enigmatically. In February, a second show of recent monumental sculptures made of Cor-Ten steel opened at Marlborough’s downtown New York gallery — a return to the curve after many years of sentinels, wedges and obelisks. At the Venice Biennale in May, she showed more of those colossal torques and twists. This month, the Beverly Pepper Sculpture Park opened in Todi, featuring 16 works donated by the artist in a landscape of her design. (The 2019 “Todi Columns” have made their permanent home here.) She’s also just completed construction of her latest “amphisculpture” — classically inspired outdoor performance spaces she’s built in New Jersey, New York’s Westchester County and Pistoia, Italy. This one, in L’Aquila, seats a thousand people and is the artist’s gift to the Abruzzan city still rebuilding after the 2009 earthquake. It has already become a popular public gathering place for concerts, its smooth, curving rose-and-white granite shell rising out of a valley just down the hill from the glorious Basilica di Santa Maria di Collemaggio, built more than 700 years ago of the same local stone.

This sensitivity — to history, ecology and the community — defines Pepper’s earthworks in contrast to land art’s associations with earth-gouging excavations in far-flung desert locales. Even in her most ambitious projects there’s a lack of bombast. They range from the very urban — Barcelona’s spectacular 115,200-square-foot “Sol I Ombra Park” (1987-92), featuring a cresting mound of earth covered in ceramic tiles in shimmering azulejo blues — to the pastoral: “Hawk Hill Calgary Sentinels” (2008-10), which includes pyramids constructed on soil excavated from a wetland restoration project outside the Canadian city. Pepper’s ongoing conversation between the natural world and what we build on it calls our attention to our experience of the land rather than her mark upon it. “I can hear it,” she says of the earth. “Can’t you?”

A FEW DAYS before the installation, I visit Pepper at the verdant rolling hills surrounding Torre Gentile, the village in Todi that has been her home since the early 1970s, when she and her husband, Curtis Bill Pepper, the journalist and author, bought and renovated the castle at the top of a cypress-lined road. At the time, no Americans lived here, but so many of the Peppers’ visitors ended up acquiring property in the area — including the New Yorker writer Jane Kramer and the Abstract Expressionist Al Held — that it’s become known as Beverly Hills. Several years ago, before Bill died in 2014, the couple built a one-story home surrounding Pepper’s studio, and this is where I find her, perfecting models for her latest sculptures, including two taut, tapering curves sweeping dramatically upward. “A little bit thinner here,” she tells one of her assistants. “It looks like a fat woman.”

Following a bad fall three years ago, Pepper uses a wheelchair, and while she no longer makes her own full-scale models in plaster, her process still moves from sketches to maquettes in poster board, which she often fabricates at that size before going bigger. Everything she creates must look imprevedibile, or “unpredictable,” with an “incredible tension,” she says, “otherwise, it’s boring.” It’s sometimes hard for her to know when to stop: Even her iconic “Todi Columns” weren’t spared a makeover. When the price of transporting the originals from Venice turned out to be prohibitive, she remade them instead, taking the opportunity to finesse their proportions: “The neck was too stumpy.”

Time, that fourth dimension, has always been an essential element in Pepper’s work — a desire to create something outside history.

The wine comes out at lunch — an informal affair served at the kitchen table involving ravioli and greens from Pepper’s garden — and so do the stories, from her memories of Alice B. Toklas — “She came to lunch and it was rather disconcerting because she had a pronounced mustache,” recalls Pepper, “but Bill liked to flirt with all the gay ladies” — to the time Betty Friedan cornered her at an event — “She looked like a truck driver, that’s the nicest thing I can say, and she said, ‘Well, are you with us or are we not together?’ I said, ‘None of you invited me in!’”