Jackie Winsor, a sculptor who stood out from the industrial austerity of 1960s minimalism, employing simple geometric forms while crafting intense yet intimate pieces out of building supplies and natural materials — including wood, concrete and thick rope that looked like it might have been swiped from a port — died Sept. 2 at a hospital in Manhattan. She was 82.
The cause was a stroke and brain hemorrhage, said her niece Jackie Brogna.
Beginning in the late 1960s, when she moved to New York out of art school and set up her home studio in a Little Italy warehouse, Ms. Winsor made pieces that suggested a rugged yet understated new direction for American sculpture.
She used the vocabulary of minimalism, employing basic shapes and structures like cubes, spheres, pyramids and grids, but created each piece by hand, dispensing with the industrial processes used by predecessors such as Donald Judd.
The result was rough-edged rather than precise, and reflected the days, months and sometimes years that Ms. Winsor spent working on each sculpture. One of her cube-shaped pieces, featured at the 1979 Whitney Biennial, comprised five layers of glass boxes held in place with tar and wood, and “took five people two days, working 15 hours a day,” to assemble, she told the New York Times.
“Among other things, we had to make thousands of little drill holes just for the nails,” she added. “It gets you in the knees and the neck. Now I’m treating myself to a visit with my chiropractor.”
Ms. Winsor seemed to have a natural affinity for work that was physically demanding or even grueling. She spent her free time attending dance classes and doing gymnastics at a Midtown gym, and grew up in fishing villages on the barren coast of Newfoundland, learning the fundamentals of carpentry from her father, a factory foreman and electrical engineer with architectural ambitions.
“In my childhood,” she said, “I was as familiar with a plumb and square as I was with oatmeal.”
As a sculptor, she was far from prolific, completing fewer than 40 pieces during the first decade of her career. But her work was so striking that in 1979, coinciding with the Whitney show, she became the first female sculptor to be given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. A survey of her work was later featured at P.S. 1, now part of MoMA, when the contemporary art center opened its newly renovated Queens exhibition space in 1997.
The P.S. 1 show offered a potent reminder of “just how complex Ms. Winsor’s seemingly simple, quietly excessive objects really are,” New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote in a review. “They neatly corrupted Minimalism’s factory-perfect masculinity with a femininity that was at once Amazonian and refined.”
Many of Ms. Winsor’s pieces sat directly on the floor or leaned against the wall, as in “Bound Square” (1972), a framelike arrangement of four logs. The wooden pieces are connected at the corners not with nails but with twine, wrapped in thick knots that Ms. Winsor likened to athletes’ bulging muscles.
Another sculpture, “#2 Copper” (1976), consists of 36 wooden rods wrapped with copper wire. The industrial material is wound so tightly and intricately that it looks like delicate balls of yarn — an uncanny illusion for a sculpture that weighs some 2,000 pounds and was installed at Ohio’s Akron Art Museum with help from a forklift.
Ms. Winsor, who initially trained as a painter, told art historian Whitney Chadwick that she approached sculpture as an extension of drawing: “A line goes around and around and around and around. Part of how I thought of these early pieces is you just make the form full and fatter and fatter and fatter until you’ve built a shape, much like we build a house: more bricks, more bricks, more bricks.”
By the late 1970s, she was making mysterious wood and concrete cubes, squat, houselike structures that were often just a few feet tall. Her signature was a small square hole, cut out of each side, that enabled viewers to peer inside at colorful red or blue interiors. Some of the pieces were meticulously created, then intentionally damaged: hacked, burned or dynamited before being sent off to the gallery.
Ms. Winsor made “Exploded Piece” (1980-82) by blowing up and then carefully reassembling one of her cubes. She completed “Burnt Piece” (1977-78) by setting a cube of wood, cement and wire mesh atop a fire. The sculpture roasted for about five hours, smoldering at a dump near Coney Island under the supervision of engineers from the city sanitation department, in what Ms. Winsor described as an effort to push the work “to its structural limit.” (The piece held together, although Ms. Winsor said some fragments of concrete popped off, landing 15 feet away.)
Some art critics saw an emotional resonance in the damaged cubes, noting that Ms. Winsor’s marriage to sculptor Keith Sonnier collapsed around the same time. Ms. Winsor denied that the breakup played much of a role in those works, telling the Los Angeles Times in 1992 that “Burnt Piece” came together because of a recurring dream she had about a fire at her studio. Curiously, one of the walls later did catch fire.
“I give a good number of [my sculptures] activities that you experience in your life,” she said. “We’ve all had our emotional lives, we’ve gone through the wringer now and again.”
The second of three sisters, Vera Jacqueline Winsor was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland, on Oct. 20, 1941. The family moved frequently — “by the time I was thirteen,” Ms. Winsor told Chadwick, “we had lived in thirteen houses” — and went south in search of a warmer climate, joining relatives in Cambridge, Mass.
Ms. Winsor studied painting at what is now the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1965. Two years later, she earned an MFA from Rutgers University, where she met Sonnier, a fellow student who became known for his playful neon sculptures.
They married and, in 1967, moved to New York, renting a multistory warehouse on Mulberry Street with another Rutgers alum, painter Joan Snyder, and their former art history professor, Mark Berger. While the building had no hot water, it had plenty of space, providing Ms. Winsor room to work on pieces like “Dark Vertical Cylinder,” a towering column of rope — standing erect with help from wire and galvanized tin — that suggested concealed force and energy.
During the women’s liberation movement of that era, Ms. Winsor sought to carve out her own place in the male-dominated art world, alongside friends including Mary Miss, a sculptor and land art pioneer. “We both shared this determination to be taken seriously and not pushed aside,” Miss said in an interview.
“There are so many people who have tried to take common materials and transform them, especially now. But it’s really hard to take plywood or logs and string and make something of intensity — that elicits an intense, visceral response — and Jackie was able to do that,” she added. “That close, introspective way of looking at things, at details, was characteristic of her life and work.”
Ms. Winsor supported herself with help from teaching jobs, working as an art instructor at Hunter College and the School of Visual Arts in New York, and made her solo show debut in the city in 1973, at Paula Cooper Gallery, a bastion of minimalist and conceptual art. She received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1978.
Her marriage to Sonnier ended in divorce two years later, although they remained close until his death in 2020. Survivors include her two sisters.
Like Judd and Robert Morris, Ms. Winsor incorporated mirrors into some of her sculptures, including “Pink and Blue Piece” (1985), a cube that was exhibited earlier this year in a group show at her alma mater, MassArt.
Each side of the cube is covered with mirrors and light pink wood, with a small hole in the center that allows viewers to peer inside. The mirrors made it possible to see yourself in the art, Ms. Winsor noted, so long as you weren’t looking through one of the piece’s openings.
“You never can see your reflection in there,” she said. “Your inner reflection is more illusive.”
