Lynda Benglis

To make Contraband, Benglis poured five hundred pounds each of several colors of pigmented latex onto the floor, allowing the colors to swirl and the material to congeal into a shape she could neither anticipate nor control. A signal work of Process art—in which form emerges in the activity of making and the work becomes a record of its own creation—Contraband flouted the rigid geometries and neutral palette of much contemporaneous Minimalist art. In fact, although Benglis planned Contraband for inclusion in the Whitney’s landmark 1969 exhibition Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, she withdrew it in response to curatorial concerns that the work’s Day-Glo hues would overwhelm the show’s more monochromatic selections. In 2008 Benglis said of Contraband, “I think I’m painting with liquids but making objects that are dimensional, that have a sense of their own space.” She followed this piece with other “spill” works— globs of polyurethane foam massed in corners and on walls and floors—and, in the four decades since, has produced a three-dimensional body of work notable for its range and innovation.