Jackie Winsor, who sculpted with wood, rope and concrete, dies at 82
Jackie Winsor, a sculptor who stood out from the industrial austerity of 1960s minimalism, employing simple geometric forms while crafting intense yet intimate pieces out of building supplies and natural materials - including wood, concrete and thick rope that looked like it might have been swiped from a port - died Sept. 2 at a hospital in Manhattan. She was 82.
The cause was a stroke and brain hemorrhage, said her niece Jackie Brogna.
Beginning in the late 1960s, when she moved to New York out of art school and set up her home studio in a Little Italy warehouse, Ms. Winsor made pieces that suggested a rugged yet understated new direction for American sculpture.
She used the vocabulary of minimalism, employing basic shapes and structures like cubes, spheres, pyramids and grids, but created each piece by hand, dispensing with the industrial processes used by predecessors such as Donald Judd.
The result was rough-edged rather than precise, and reflected the days, months and sometimes years that Ms. Winsor spent working on each sculpture. One of her cube-shaped pieces, featured at the 1979 Whitney Biennial, comprised five layers of glass boxes held in place with tar and wood, and “took five people two days, working 15 hours a day,” to assemble, she told the New York Times.
“Among other things, we had to make thousands of little drill holes just for the nails,” she added. “It gets you in the knees and the neck. Now I’m treating myself to a visit with my chiropractor.”
Ms. Winsor seemed to have a natural affinity for work that was physically demanding or even grueling. She spent her free time attending dance classes and doing gymnastics at a Midtown gym, and grew up in fishing villages on the barren coast of Newfoundland, learning the fundamentals of carpentry from her father, a factory foreman and electrical engineer with architectural ambitions.
“In my childhood,” she said, “I was as familiar with a plumb and square as I was with oatmeal.”
As a sculptor, she was far from prolific, completing fewer than 40 pieces during the first decade of her career. But her work was so striking that in 1979, coinciding with the Whitney show, she became the first female sculptor to be given a retrospective at the
Museum of Modern Art. A survey of her work was later featured at P.S. 1, now part of MOMA, when the contemporary art center opened its newly renovated Queens exhibition space in 1997.
The P.S. 1 show offered a potent reminder of “just how complex Ms. Winsor’s seemingly simple, quietly excessive objects really are,” New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote in a review.