Art in Context

Lynda Benglis grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana and obtained her MFA in 1964 at Newcomb College in New Orleans. By the end of the decade she had moved to New York City. The Bykert Gallery, where she worked, was the first to display her art, and it was at this gallery that she encountered the Vogels. Between 1969 and 1974 she held fifteen solo shows. Life gave her a double-page photo spread in 1970. Her sculptures were unorthodox, the materials dripped or poured, encaustic and latex built up in colored lumps and mounds, or tipped in streams across the floor and labeled Odalisque, a riff on the traditional wall-mounted canvas painting. The size and color of her works stood out in a period of minimalism. A teaching position at the University of Rochester brought her into contact with the school’s video equipment and in 1972 she began a series of pioneering video works. Recently she has experimented with ceramics. “Benglis's willingness to mix up gendered tropes (e.g., heroic scale and sparkly finishes) and to laugh at credos of every ideological stripe set her apart from both the orthodoxies of feminism and the sexism of the mainstream art world,” reported Art in America during a traveling retrospective in 2009. “Looking back now, we see that her work, for all its variety, always remains grounded in process and materials.” The Guggenheim Museum has her work in its collection, as does the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, the Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum, and the National Gallery of Art. Benglis has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment of the Arts grants.