Herbert Ferber (1906 – 1991) was an American Abstract Expressionist, sculptor and painter, and a "driving force of the New York School.

[1] During the 1930s, his works were "primarily figurative and imagistic,"[1] influenced in part by an interest in German expressionists as well as African and pre-Columbian sculpture.

[1] Starting in 1946, he associated with Abstract Expressionist painters, frequented Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century, and became more interested in Surrealism.

[5] In 1952, Ferber completed a commission for the facade of the Congregation B'nai Israel; the result was the relief sculpture "Titled And the bush was not consumed.

"[1][6][7] In 1956, Ferber joined artists who protested a curvilinear slope of Frank Lloyd Wright's planned building for the Guggenheim Museum.

[1] In 1961, for the Whitney Museum of American Art, he created one of the first indoor environmental installations, "Titled Sculpture as Environment," a fiberglass piece for an entire room with interior spaces to visit.

[3] Herbert Ferber died age on August 20, 1991, of cancer of the bile at his summer home in Egremont, Massachusetts.

At his death in 1991, the New York Times said: Mr. Ferber was one of a small group of American sculptors who in the 1940s began to break with the traditional notion of sculpture as a solid, closed mass.

"[4] In 2019, the Wall Street Journal noted: In 1949, Clement Greenberg counted Ferber, along with Isamu Noguchi and (David) Smith, among a handful of "sculptor-constructors who have a chance... to contribute something ambitious, serious and original" to what he recognized as an important "new genre" of American metal sculpture.

With , Ferber created an installation executed in fiberglass for a room at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, opening up the interior space of the work for the viewer to enter.

[citation needed] Ferber's works have appeared the Metropolitan, the Modern, and Whitney museums in New York and in Europe.