Lee Bontecou

(American, 1931–2022)

Lee Bontecou is an American artist best known for her abstract sculptural wall works. Built using canvas, conveyer belts, and mail sacks attached to welded steel frames, Bontecou’s sculptures feature dark openings that evoke bodily orifices. Despite their accepted vaginal symbolism, these works primarily address materiality as a conceptual gesture, thereby linking Bontecou to both the Minimalist Donald Judd and feminist artists like Judy Chicago. “The natural world and its visual wonders and horrors—man-made devices with their mind-boggling engineering feats and destructive abominations, elusive human nature and its multiple ramifications from the sublime to unbelievable abhorrences—to me are all one,” the artist has explained. Born on January 15, 1931 in Providence, RI, she studied at the Art Students League in New York under William Zorach before attending the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where she learned to weld. Bontecou exhibited at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York during the 1960s alongside prominent artists such as Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg. Today, her works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others. Bontecou lives and works in Orbisonia, PA.