Lynda Benglis was born (1941) into a proper Louisiana family, went to a proper Louisiana school (Newcomb College, where she earned a B.F.A. in 1964), and went off to New York City to study painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. Somewhere along the line, however, the scenario changed. Irritated at the way most art magazines and art reviews tended to ignore women artists and their works, she took out a two-page ad in Art Forum, in which she posed, wearing only a pair of sunglasses and holding a giant dildo between her legs, for an attack on Art Forum and the art establishment for ignoring the work of women artists. Her chosen medium has been mostly latex and ceramic sculptures, though she has also produced sculptures using beeswax, metals, polyurethane foam, glass, and paper. Over the years, she has become, as Tracy Zwick suggested in a recent interview with her for Art in America newsletter, January 2014, "something of a mythic artist, known for her fierce independence and notorious lampooning of the New York Art world in her Art Forum ad." Her poured latex and ceramic sculptures offer a view of a world which is messy, oozing, and refuses to be confined into recognized shapes and forms. In a 2011 review by Hilarie M. Sheets, Benglis looked back at her coming of age in the art world of the early1970s at a time when Minimalism was the new thing: "To me it was so closed and systematic that it had nothing to do with art, really," she said. As Sheets notes, "Benglis adopted the vast scale and industrial materials favored by Minimalists like Donald Judd and Carl Andre, but let her colorful latex pouring allude to bodily gestures, fluids and topographies, and harden into a kind of skin." After a multi-veenued, multi-media retrospective that went from the Netherlands, Ireland, France, and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, the show ended at the New Museum on the lower east side of Manhattan. Benglis's work cn be found in such places as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Albright-Know in Buffalo, the Detroit Institite of Arts, the High Museum of art in Atlanta, which producedd a large and useful catalogue of her works for a travelling exhibition in 1991, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum of Women in the arts (Washington D.C.), the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City MO, the Australian National Gallery (Canberra), the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art (Japan), the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and many others. Her work is also featured in one of the segments in the PBS Series Art:21, season 6. Although Benglis is best known as a sculptor, she has made over 60 original prints and monotypes.

Bibliography: Lynda Benglis and Richard Marshall, Linda Benglis (NY: Cheim & Reid, 2004); Anna C. Chave, Lynda Benglis: Everything Flows: 1980-2013 (Philadelphia: Locks Gallery, 2013); Martin Friedman, Up Against the Wall with Lynda Benglis ((Art in America, Dec. 2009, pp. 102-109; Friedman was director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 1961-1990); Klaus Kertess, Lynda Benglis: Chimera (Rottweil, Germany: Forum Kunst Rottweil, 1998); Susan Krane, Lynda Benglis: Dual Natures (Atlanta: High Museum, 1991); Julian Kreimer, Lynda Benglis Shape Shifter (Art in America, Dec. 2009, pp. 94-101); Elisabeth Lebovici, Judith Tannenbaum, Caroline Hancock, Franck Gautherot, Laura Hoptman and an artist statement by Richard Tuttle, Linda Benglis (Paris: Les Presses du Reel, 2009; this important monograph was published on the occasion of a travelling exhibition with venues in Dublin, Eindhoven, Dijon, Rhode Island and the New Museum in New York).

For an extensive list of her one-person shows, awards, and works in public collections including the Metropolitan Museum, MoMA, the Whitney, Guggenheim Museum (New York City), the Hirshhorn, the National Gallery of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Smithsonion American Art Museum (Washington D.C.), the Museum of Fine Art (Boston), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Walker Art Center (MN), the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City MO), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and many other museums in the U.S., as well as the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art (Japan), the Australian National Gallery, the Auckland City Gallery (New Zealand), the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), National Art Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia), and the Tate Modern (London), see Chave 2013, pp. 74-91.