Jackie Winsor
1941–2024
Jackie Winsor’s sculptures inflect the primary geometric language of Minimalism with a singular aesthetic that derives from handmade processes, human scale, and ordinary and organic materials. Initially trained as a painter, Winsor began making three-dimensional works in the late 1960s using rope, nails, wood, bricks, and copper wire, often crafting their forms via repetitive, manual actions such as wrapping, stacking, and hammering. These materials and techniques aligned with a Postminimalist interest in process and duration, but also derived from Winsor’s upbringing on the coast of Newfoundland, where her engineer father built houses.
In Cement Piece, which was included in the 1977 Whitney Biennial, Winsor constructed a three-foot cube from wood lath and wire-reinforced concrete. Small square portals cut into the center of each of its six sides allow viewers to peer into the center of the form. Winsor’s use of the cube, a shape that dominates her sculpture from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s, was in part inspired by a dream in which she dug into a spot of light on her studio wall until she broke through to the adjacent space. As the dream suggests, the “neutral” form of the cube allowed her to address relationships between positive and negative space. For Winsor, the cube-shaped sculptures focus on “creating a balance between the physical grid and an intangible grid—bringing openness and airiness into the pieces and still retaining their solidity.” They take on a monumental Minimalist form, only to open it up and reveal its interior.
Introduction
Vera Jacqueline Winsor (October 20, 1941 – September 2, 2024) was a Newfoundland-born American sculptor. Her style, which developed in the early 1970s as a reaction to the work of minimal artists, has been characterized as post-minimal, anti-form, and process art.
Informed by her own personal history, Winsor's sculptures from this period sit at the intersection of minimalism and feminism, maintaining an attention to elementary geometry and symmetrical form while eschewing minimalism's reliance on industrial materials and methods through the incorporation of hand-crafted, organic materials such as wood and hemp.
Winsor exhibited her works in several exhibitions. In 1979, a mid-career retrospective of her work opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, (MoMA); this was the first time MoMA had presented a retrospective of work by a woman artist since 1946. Other exhibitions of her work included "American Woman Artist Show," April 14 – May 14, 1974, at the Kunsthaus Hamburg (Germany), curated by Sybille Niester and Lil Picard; "26 Contemporary Women Artists," April 18 – June 13, 1971, at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Lucy Lippard; and "Jackie Winsor: With and Within", October 19, 2014 – April 5, 2015, at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Amy Smith-Stewart.
Wikidata identifier
Q6120232
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed July 3, 2025.
Introduction
Sculptor used a variety of materials to create her work. She emerged in New York alongside the Minimalists during the 1970s.
Country of birth
Canada
Roles
Artist, sculptor
ULAN identifier
500077642
Names
Jackie Winsor, Jacqueline Winsor, Jacque Winsor
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed July 3, 2025.
