1. Lee Bontecou was an American sculptor and printmaker and a pioneer figure in the New York art world.
20 Facts About Lee Bontecou
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Lee Bontecou kept her work consistently in a recognizable style, and received broad recognition in the 1960s.
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Lee Bontecou's work has been shown and collected in many major museums in the United States and in Europe.
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Lee Bontecou's father was a salesman and was involved with the development of the aluminum canoe.
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Lee Bontecou attended Bradford Junior College in Haverhill, Massachusetts for her general education and then attended the Art Students League of New York from 1952 to 1955, where she studied with the sculptor William Zorach.
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Lee Bontecou spent the summer of 1954 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where she learned to weld.
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Lee Bontecou's mother wired transmitters for submarine navigation and her father sold gliders for the military.
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Lee Bontecou was best known for the sculptures she created in 1959 and the 1960s, which challenged artistic conventions of both materials and presentation by hanging on the wall.
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Lee Bontecou was one of the first female artists to be exhibited at Leo Castelli's art gallery in the 1960s, alongside Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and Robert Rauschenberg.
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Lee Bontecou continued to teach through the 1990s, while spending time in Pennsylvania.
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Lee Bontecou moved to Orbisonia, Pennsylvania full-time in 1988 where she continued to work.
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Lee Bontecou was brought back to public attention by a 2003 retrospective co-organized by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, that traveled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2004.
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In 2010, the Museum of Modern Art presented a retrospective of Lee Bontecou's work entitled All Freedom in Every Sense.
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In 2014, her drawings were exhibited in Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds, organized by The Menil Collection, which traveled to the Princeton University Art Museum.
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Lee Bontecou's work has been characterized by references to the synergy between nature and fiction, resulting naturalistically rendered creatures, with grotesquely morphed features.
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Lee Bontecou worked with many materials, such as metal, paper, plastic, and fibreglass.
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Lee Bontecou worked with unconventional materials and discovered new techniques.
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Lee Bontecou was married to the artist William Giles with whom she had a daughter, Valerie.
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Lee Bontecou died in Florida on November 8,2022, at the age of 91.
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Lee Bontecou's image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.