Jackie winsor burnt piece

Object Details

interviewee

Winsor, Jackie, 1941-

interviewer

Kachur, Lewis

Subject

Massachusetts College of Art

Rutgers University

Place of publication, production, or execution

United States

Physical Description

255 Pages, Transcript

General Note

Originally recorded on 10 sound cassettes. Reformatted in 2010 as 20 digital wav files. Duration is 14 hr., 17 min.

Summary

An interview of Jackie Winsor conducted 1990-1992, by Lewis Kachur, for the Archives of American Art. Winsor describes her childhood in Newfoundland and New Brunswick, Canada; her art education at Massachusetts College of Art and Rutgers University; moving to New York City and the art scene there, especially SoHo; the development of her artwork; and a trip to India.

Citation

Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Jackie Winsor, 1990-1992. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Funding

Funding for this interview was provided by the Lannan Foundation. Funding for the digital preservation of this interview was provided by a grant from the Save Americ

•

Jackie Winsor

by Whitney Chadwick

WC: Why is process so important in your work, and how is it manifested in your sculpture?

JW: Do you mean how have I looked at my early pieces that people associate with 'the process'? Because that meant something very different in 1970 than what it seems to mean at this moment.

WC: Maybe we could go back to what it meant to you when you started working that way.

Bound Logs, wood and hemp, 2743.2x787.4x469.9 mm, 1972–3, photo courtesy of the artist

JW: When I was first making sculpture, I just dove in and made full-scale sculpture right off the bat with no transition from being a painter. As a painter I was very interested in drawing, so when I was working on sculptural shapes I was thinking of them as drawings, you know: 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. What I have in mind is not necessarily my first pieces. I'

•

Jacqueline Winsor

Canadian-American sculptor (1941–2024)

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.^[1][2]

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.^[2][3]

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);^[4] this was the first time MoMA had presented a retrospective of work by a woman artist since 1946.^[5] Other exhibitions of her work included "American Woman Artist Show," April 14 – May 1