Jackie Winsor with Gold Piece (1987), 1987. Photo: Eeva Inkeri
Paula Cooper Gallery is deeply saddened to announce the death of Jackie Winsor on Monday, September 2, 2024. She was surrounded by family, with her sisters Maxine Holmberg and Gloria Christie and niece Jackie Brogna. She was 82 years.
A dedicated sculptor, her circles, squares, grids, and cubes, made of humble materials, like rope, twine, wood, or bricks, exhibited traces of the artist’s hand and labor. Each piece, unique in concept, form and character, also explored interiority and surface, depth and layering and each brimmed with intense presence.
Peter Schjeldahl described her as “severe in the discipline of grace,” and one of “the most exacting and refined of the several major artists – including Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and the late Eva Hesse – who have extended and modified the aesthetic revolution of minimalism since the late 1960s.” [1] Ellen Johnson wrote, “Winsor’s sculpture is as stable and as silent as the pyramids; yet it conveys not the awesome silence of death, but rather a living quietude in which multiple opposing forces are held in equilibrium”. [2]
In 1979, the Museum of Modern Art presented a mid-career retrospective of Winsor’s work, the second retrospective exhibition of a female artist since Georgia O’Keefe’s first in 1946; the retrospective traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the Fort Worth Art Museum in Texas.
Winsor’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Detroit Institute of Art; the Walker Art Center; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; the Fonds Nationals d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, among others. She received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; a National Endowment for the Arts Award; and a Honorary Doctorate from the University of Newfoundland. She was on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts, where she received a Distinguished Artist-Teacher Award.
Paula Cooper worked with Jackie Winsor since the early 1970s. Her first one person exhibition was in 1973, followed by 11 more one person shows as well as numerous group exhibitions. Jackie was a core part of the Paula Cooper Gallery family. We will miss her terribly, and extend our deepest condolences to her family and friends.
[1] Peter Schjeldahl, “The Structure of Who: Jackie Winsor’s Sculpture,” in Jackie Winsor, (Bignan: Domaine de Kerguéhennec, 1988), p. 2
[2] Ellen Johnson, “Introduction,” in Jackie Winsor, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1979), p. 9