Weld: a joint; to repair; to unite, or reunite, closely or intimately:
Lee Bontecou

Artists often experiment for the first time with new materials or techniques when they arrive to Skowhegan’s campus. One of the best places to conduct such experiments is the sculpture yard. Some would say that it is now equipped with everything a sculptor could dream of—a sculpture pavilion for metal, woodwork, and fabrication, and dedicated spaces for ceramics and textiles. Its a space the School maintains as a blank form to encourage imagination and the testing of new ideas and projects. In its earliest years, however, it was literally and physically an open space ripe for imagination, surrounded by studios. Although minimalist in design, what manifested was maximalist in the (un)bounds that the participants imagined within that open space, the same ethos that remains today.

Lee Bontecou was one of these imaginative participants during the summer of 1955, seeking out new ideas for her work. Upon application earlier that year, she was a student at the Art Student’s League in New York, and worked as a Clerk for the American Craftsmen Educational Council and as a library attendant. Over the course of the summer she developed a new skill that would take her work and life into path-making directions: she learned to weld. This method would become an integral part of her assemblage sculptures by the late 1950s. Even in her early works in the sculpture yard, she combined metal pieces and created visuals of bodily orifices, space-age portals, or allusions to the industrial textures of wartime. These same visuals would remain as she moved beyond Skowhegan and developed wall-hanging works with combinations of metal, rope, grommets, and textiles—oftentimes rags from the laundromat below her New York apartment. While new materials and techniques entered her practice, the concept behind welding continued with her—joining, bringing together multiple meanings, creating duplicitous ideas—as her prolific practice grew.

In addition to photographs, selections of Lee’s time experimenting with other sculptural materials are located in a home movie from our records. The footage includes the following segments:

[1] Campus entrance + views.

[2] Participants working outdoors, in the “Life Studio,” and on campus, 1964.

[3] Participants during a critique in front of the fresco barn.

[4] Participants working in the sculpture yard, 1955.

[5] Founder Willard “Bill” Cummings with participants during an outdoor critique, 1955.

These materials reside in our records and archives. Additional materials are accessible at archive@skowheganart.org and also through the Archives of American Art, Washington D.C.