Jackie Winsor, Sculptor of Mysterious, Labor-Intensive Art, Dies at 82

Jackie Winsor, a sculptor whose painstakingly crafted pieces made of bricks, wood, copper, and cement feel like riddles that are impossible to unravel, has died at 82. Her sisters, Maxine Holmberg and Gloria Christie, and her extended family confirmed her death on Tuesday, saying that she died of a stroke.

Winsor rose to fame in New York alongside the Minimalists during the 1970s. Her art, with its repetitive forms and the challenging processes used to craft them, even seemed at times to resemble the finest works of that movement.

But Winsor’s sculptures contained some key differences: they were not only made using industrial materials, and they evinced a softer touch and an inner warmth that is not present in most Minimalist sculptures.

Her laborious sculptures were produced slowly, often because she would perform physically difficult actions over and over. As critic Lucy Lippard wrote in Artforum, “Winsor often refers to ‘muscle’ when she talks about her work, not just the muscle it takes to make the pieces and haul them around, but the muscle which is the kinesthetic property of wound and bound forms, of the energy it takes to make a piece so simple and still so full of an almost frightening presence, mitigated but not lessened by a humorous gawkiness.”

By 1979, the year that her work could be seen in the Whitney Biennial and a survey at New York’s Museum of Modern Art simultaneously, Winsor had produced fewer than 40 pieces. She had by that point been working for over a decade.

For #2 Copper (1976), a work that appeared in the MoMA show, Winsor wrapped together 36 pieces of wood using balls of #2 industrial copper wire that she wound around them. This strenuous process gave way to a sculpture that ultimately weighed in at 2,000 pounds. Ohio’s Akron Art Museum, which owns the piece, has been forced to rely upon a forklift in order to install it.

For Burnt Piece (1977–78), Winsor crafted a wood frame that enclosed a square of cement. Then she burned away the wood frame, for which she required the technical expertise of Sanitation Department workers, who assisted in lighting up the piece in a dump near Coney Island. The process was not just difficult—it was also dangerous. Pieces of cement popped off as the fire blazed, rising 15 feet into the air. “I never knew until the last minute if it would explode during the firing or crack when cooling,” she told the New York Times.

But for all the drama of making it, the piece exudes a quiet beauty: Burnt Piece, now owned by MoMA, merely resembles charred strips of cement that are interrupted by squares of wire mesh. It is placid and strange, and as is the case with many Winsor works, one can peer into it, seeing only darkness on the inside.

As curator Ellen H. Johnson once put it, “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.”

Jacqueline Winsor was born in 1942 in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. As a child, she witnessed her father toiling away at various tasks, including designing a house that her mother ended up building. Memories of his labor wound their way into works such as Nail Piece (1970), for which Winsor looked back to the time that her dad gave her a bag of nails to drive into a piece of wood. She was instructed to hammer in a pound’s worth, and ended up putting in 12 times as much. Nail Piece, a work about the “feeling of concealed energy,” recalls that experience with seven pieces of pine board, each affixed to each other and lined with nails.

She attended the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston as an undergraduate, then Rutger University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, as an MFA student, graduating in 1967. Then she moved to New York alongside two of her friends, artists Joan Snyder and Keith Sonnier, who also studied at Rutgers.

Winsor had studied painting, and this made her transition to sculpture seem unlikely. But certain works drew comparisons between the two mediums. Bound Square (1972) is a square-shaped piece of wood whose corners are wrapped in twine. The sculpture, at more than six feet tall, looks like a frame that is missing the human-sized painting meant to be held within.

Pieces like this one were shown widely in New York at the time, appearing in four Whitney Biennials between 1973 and 1983 alone, as well as one Whitney-organized sculpture survey that preceded the formation of the Biennial in 1970. She also showed regularly with Paula Cooper Gallery, at the time the go-to gallery for Minimalist art in New York, and figured in Lucy Lippard’s 1971 show “26 Contemporary Women Artists” at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut, which is considered a key exhibition within the development of feminist art.

When Winsor later added color to her sculptures during the 1980s, something she had seemingly avoided previous to then, she said: “Well, I used to be a painter when I was in college. So I don’t think you lose that.”

In that decade, Winsor began to depart from her art of the ’70s. With Burnt Piece, the work made using explosives and cement, she wanted “destruction be a part of the process of construction,” as she once put it; with Open Cube (1983), she wanted to do the opposite. She produced a crimson-colored cube from plaster, then disassembled its sides, leaving it in a shape that recalled a cross. “I thought I was going to have a plus sign,” she said. “What I got was a red Christian cross.” Doing so left her “vulnerable” for an entire year afterward, she added.

Works from this period onward did not draw the same admiration from critics. When she began making plaster wall reliefs with small portions emptied out, critic Roberta Smith wrote that these pieces were “undercut by familiarity and a sense of manufacture.”

While the reputation of those works is still in flux, Winsor’s art of the ’70s has been canonized. When MoMA expanded in 2019 and rehung its galleries, one of her sculptures was shown alongside pieces by Louise Bourgeois, Lynda Benglis, and Melvin Edwards.

By her own admission, Winsor was “very fussy.” She concerned herself with the details of her sculptures, slaving over every eighth of an inch. She worried in advance how they would all turn out and tried to envision what viewers might see when they gazed at one.

She seemed to delight in the fact that viewers could not gaze into her pieces, viewing them as a parallel in that way for people themselves. “Your inner reflection is more illusive,” she once said.