Pioneer Information
Born in Paris, France, Bourgeois’s artistic career spanned eight decades, in which she alternated between forms, material, and scale, habitually probing themes of sexuality, loneliness, jealousy, and fear. Raised in the suburb of Choisy-le-Roi, she worked in her family’s tapestry restoration workshop as a child, fostering a lifelong exploration of materiality.
After earning a baccalaureate in philosophy from the Lycée Fénelon in 1932, Bourgeois briefly studied mathematics at the Sorbonne before attending different academies and artists’ ateliers in Paris. In 1938 she moved to New York City, where she attended the Art Students League, studying painting and producing sculpture and prints.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, she became immersed in psychoanalysis, and in 1964 exhibited new sculptures. During this time she began working with latex, plaster, marble, bronze, and fabric, producing increasingly visceral sculptures that examined the body, sexuality, and emotional experience. In the 1970s she produced her first room-sized installations and was commissioned by the U.S. General Services Administration to design a public, outdoor sculpture—Facets to the Sun (1978)—in Manchester, New Hampshire.
By the 1990s Bourgeois produced large-scale works, including a series of room-size installations (Cells) and metal spiders—a motif imbued with psychological and biographical meaning. Bourgeois created her largest spider sculpture, Maman (1999), to honor her mother. She produced six monumental castings from the original—each measuring approximately 30 feet tall. The castings are displayed globally, including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain.
In 1998 she collaborated with landscape architect Dan Kiley and architect Michael Graves to design Agnes R. Katz Plaza in Pittsburgh, creating a 25-foot-tall bronze fountain and three pairs of granite benches sculpted to look like human eyes. Five years later, she designed the Father and Son fountain at Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park and in 2010 collaborated with architect Peter Zumthor to design a memorial for the victims of Norway’s seventeenth century witch trials. Located in Vardø, Norway, the Steilneset Memorial opened publicly in 2011, a year after Bourgeois passed away at the age of 98 in New York City.
