Background

Ethnicity: Lynda Benglis’s grandparents were of a Greek origin.

Lynda Benglis was born on October 25, 1941, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, United States to a Greek-American family. She is a first-born of Michael A. Benglis, a building materials businessman, and Leah Margaret Blackwelder, a preacher’s daughter.

Education

Lynda Benglis was a student of the McNeese State University in her native Lake Charles, Louisiana. Then, she pursued her education at the women's college of Tulane University in New Orleans later known as the Newcomb College (closed in 2006). Benglis received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in ceramics and painting in 1964.

Later, she was taught painting by the abstract artist Reuben Tam at the Brooklyn Museum Art School.

In 2000, the artist obtained an honorary Doctorate degree from the Kansas City Art Institute, Missouri.

Career

Lynda Benglis began her career in 1964 from a teacher’s post at the Jefferson Parish Public School in Louisiana. Then, the artist came to New York City where she enlarged the circle of her artistic contacts by meeting such artists as Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Eva Hesse, and Barnett Newman. To earn her living in the city, Benglis became an assistant of Klaus Kertess at the Bykert Gallery where in 1968 she presented to the public her early paintings and sculptures for the first time. Benglis’s debut solo exhibition was held in a couple of years at the Paula Cooper Gallery which became the artist representative for several years.

Experimenting with a variety of materials, Benglis ended up to use paint not on the canvases but by putting it directly on the floor. One of the early examples of such creations was her ‘Fallen Painting’ of 1968.

The following decade was the time of the artist’s first experiments with video. She collaborated with Robert Morris producing 'Mumble' (1972) and taking part in his ‘Exchange’ (1973). Other works in this field include ‘Now’, ‘Noise’, ‘On Screen’, all of 1972, and her most notable movie ‘Female Sensibility’ produced a year later.

In addition to her artistic investigations during this period, Benglis tried to transmit her artistic knowledge to the young generation as well. In 1970, she joined the teacher’s staff at the University of Rochester and had worked there as an assistant professor for two years. Then, she gave art lessons at the Yale University School of Art as a visiting professor and the same year occupied the professor’s post at the Hunter College. She spent there one year. Lynda Benglis also worked in such institutions as California Institute of the Arts (1974, 1976), the Princeton University (1975), the Kent State University (1977) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1979).

As an adherent of feminist views in art, Benglis selected the strong substances in her artworks originally attributed to the male artists, including stone, bricks, clay, steel and others. Moreover, she often presented herself as a piece of art like it was in her provocative advertisement picture in the Artforum magazine in 1974. Wearing only the sunglasses, the artist was photographed nude holding an oversized dildo.

To find the inspiration for her new creations, Lynda Benglis has travelled a lot during her career. So, she has spent time in Megisti island in Greece, and in New Mexico where she had two studios.

In 1979, Benglis visited Ahmedabad, India where she was hired as an artist-in-residence by a well-known family.

At the beginning of the new decade, she returned to the United States and in 1980 recommenced her teaching activity firstly as the professor of Hunter College and a year later at the University of Arizona in Tuscon. Since 1985, she had taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York City for five years. This period, she also read lectures at Bard College (1987).

Since 1969, the artist had in total about seventy-five solo shows in the United States and abroad, including the exhibitions in Belgium, Greece, France, United Kingdom, Norway, Mexico and Italy.

Lynda Benglis continues to experiment with multiple art styles and technics by proclaiming herself free from belonging to any of the existent art movements.

Achievements

• Lynda Benglis is an accomplished artist whose sculptural compositions are widely known in the United States and abroad. Benglis somehow made a revolution in painting and sculpture and erased the boundaries between these media by using paint as the material for her sculptural compositions.
  
  Benglis was a recipient of such awards as the Australia Council Award for the Arts, the Distinction Award from the National Council of Arts Administrators and Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award. Besides, she received many grants during her career, including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts grant (twice) among others.
  
  Forgotten for a long time probably because of her provocative appearance in the Artforum magazine, Lynda Benglis’s art was rediscovered by many retrospectives. One of the first took place at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2009 and was followed by a survey at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City in 2011, at the Thomas Dane Gallery in London in 2012 and at the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York three years later.
  
  Lynda Benglis’s sculptural composition titled ‘Kearny Street Bows and Fans’ was purchased at Christie's of 2014 for $245,000.
  
  Nowadays, Benglis’s artworks are in the permanent collections of many well-known art galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, all mentioned in New York City, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Walker Art Center, the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia and others.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Corner Piece

  • Contraband

• photo

  • Dale

  • Sewing Kit

  • Garden

  • Koba Road

  • Three Leaf Clover

  • Baca de Charro

  • Three Swanlike

  • Untitled

• sculpture

  • Vittorio

  • Eat Meat

  • Wing

  • Bravo

  • Alpha I

  • Baby Blatt

  • Manorama

  • Odalisque: Hey Hey Frankenthaler

  • Embryo II

  • Quartered Meteor

  • Amazing Grace

  • Night Sherbet A

  • Come

  • Psi

  • Vega

  • Cowrie

  • Maximum II

  • Fistful

  • Scarab

  • Aquanot #11

  • Aquanot #24

  • Figure 6

  • Lion Paw

  • Pink Ladies

  • Crescendo. Mother and Child

Views

Lynda Benglis is an adherent of feminist art.

Quotations: "I can't deny anything the viewer reads into the work; that is the viewer's pleasure, hopefully. I am a permissive artist. I allow things to happen. I believe the viewer is half the work. Duchamp said it and I believe it."

"My work is an expression of space. What is the experience of moving? Is it pictorial? Is it an object? Is it a feeling? It all comes from my body. [...] I am the form."

"I'm a real fan of surfaces. My father ... had samples of colours and plastics and laminates and woods in his car. I was always very interested."

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "The method of pouring latex directly onto the floor was, for Benglis, a pragmatic solution to what she considered to be an illogical attachment to a rectilinear ground. The constrictions of the conventional painting format prohibited the kinds of composition she sought to achieve with her material processes; by attending to the interactions of colour on colour, rather than color on canvas, she effectively dissolved the two-dimensional surface and its assertion as a physical ground." Susan Richmond, art historian
  
  "The images of Benglis producing her large-scale sculptures [...] aggressively stage the act of production." Amelia Jones, art historian, author and art critic
  
  "What connects Benglis's metalized pleats and ceramic works, besides the sometimes shared device of the knot, is the spontaneous directness of her methods, as well as that affinity for fluid materials, which so readily articulate directness." Anna C. Chave, art historian

Connections

Lynda Benglis was married three times.

Her first husband became an art historian Michael Kampen. The marriage was short and ended in divorce in a few months.

Then, the artist became a wife of the Scottish painter Gordon Hart.

In 1979, Benglis met her third husband Anand Sarabhai when she travelled to Ahmedabad, India. Sarabhai died in 2013.

Father:

Michael A. Benglis

Mother:

Leah Margaret Blackwelder

1st husband:

Michael Kampen

2nd husband:

Gordon Hart

3d husband:

Anand Sarabhai

colleague:

Robert Morris

colleague:

Stan Baden

References

• Lynda Benglis: Dual Natures
  1991
• Lynda Benglis: Shape-shifters
  2008
• Lynda Benglis
  2009
• Lynda Benglis: Beyond Process
  2015
• Lynda Benglis
  2018