JACKIE WINSOR

Jackie Winsor attended the Yale Summer School of Art and Music in 1964, and the Massachusetts College of Art in 1965 before earning her MFA from Rutgers State University of New Jersey in 1967. She was not long out of her studies before her work began to garner attention along with other contemporaries such as Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman who were creating what would come to be known as “Process Art” and also carry the label of ‘anti-form’ practices. Unlike many other sculptors of her generation, she did not make drawings, but nonetheless has always considered sculpture as a form of constructing with line, citing her interest in rope as a material example of lines bundled and wrapped around other lines. Over the course of time, Winsor’s sculpture has been aligned by critics and historians with the feminist movement in art, and her work was included in the seminal 1996 show More than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the '70s at the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts. However, Winsor has stated that while she fully supports feminism, she does not consider it to be in her work. Rather, artworks are to her a reflection on the structure of the self of the artist, and for this reason her upbringing tends to be of importance in understanding her practice. Raised in Nova Scotia, her father was a carpenter and engineer, and she spent much of her childhood helping him to build and maintain houses before immigrating with her parents to Boston in the 1950’s. She has acknowledged the influence of this on her later decision to select working methods requiring high quantities of labor time and involving detailed, repetitive tasks in order to complete a work.  As a result, only a few works per year have produced throughout her entire career.

Winsor was included in the Whitney’s Annual Survey: Contemporary American Sculpture exhibition in 70, and four subsequent Whitney Biennials (73, 77, 79, and 83). Winsor’s first solo exhibition was with Paula Cooper in 1973 (the first gallery to open in SoHo in 1968). A mere decade into her career in 1979, Winsor had a survey of her work at the Museum of Modern Art—the first time a show had been dedicated to a woman at the museum since 1946. It is noteworthy that in the press release for this exhibition, MoMA acknowledged that “in the past ten years, Jackie Winsor […] has made less than 40 sculptures.” Her name appeared frequently in the legendary post-minimalist aligned 70’s publication Avalanche. She currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York.