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A woman with light colored skin, wearing a black top and white pants, talks to a group of people in a gallery room. She stands in front of a large, painted portrait of a woman in a high-collared red dress.
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National Museum of Women in the Arts

Lynda Benglis

A light-skinned adult woman with short, grey hair. She gazes directly into the camera with a frank expression, her eyebrows slightly raised. On the wall next to her hang three round sculptures of grey, black and white. They are masses of coils and resemble rounded brains.

Photo courtesy of Toomey Tourrell Fine Art

Born in 1941

Born in Louisiana, Benglis began her artistic studies at Newcomb College (now part of Tulane University). After earning her BFA in 1964, she moved to New York to study painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School.

In New York, Benglis joined a close-knit artistic circle that included artists involved with Minimalism and Process Art. These styles, along with Abstract Expressionism, influenced Benglis’s hybridized creative process and approach to form.

Benglis’s early paintings led her to work with poured latex, a medium through which she hoped to free color from the canvas. Benglis continued to explore distinctive sculptural forms in polyurethane in the 1970s, and later began creating knotted and pleated metal sculptures.

Benglis, a prominent member of the feminist art movement in the 1960s and 1970s and staunch advocate for gender equality in the art world, has also created videos and photographs that focus on gender and power relations.

Artist Details

  • Name

    Lynda Benglis

  • Birth

    Lake Charles, Louisiana, 1941

  • Phonetic Spelling

    LIN-duh BEN-glihs

  • NMWA Exhibitions

    • WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, 2007
    • Partners in Printmaking: Works from SOLO Impression, 1996
    • Presswork: The Art of Women Printmakers, 1991

Works by Lynda Benglis

Eridanus

Lynda Benglis first came to art world attention in the late 1960s with tactile, sensual works that were strikingly different from the period’s prevailing Minimalism. Eridanus, titled after a river in Greek mythology, is part of a sculpture series that Benglis began in 1972. The earliest of these “knot” sculptures were made of plaster-coated chicken wire covered with paint and glitter.

By the...

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A wall-mounted sculpture made of metal convincingly resembles an elaborate knot of twisted, rolled, and tied silver and copper fabrics. Pleated ends radiate at different angles from the tangled, coppery center and project out from the wall into the viewer’s space.

Lynda Benglis, Eridanus, 1984; Bronze, zinc, copper, aluminum, and wire, 58 x 48 x 37 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of AT&T Inc.

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