Who

Now in her nineties, Bourgeois keeps churning out the sculptures that have made her one of the most famous American artists of the past 30 years.

Backstory

Born in Paris to parents who restored tapestries for a living, Bourgeois ended up moving to New York in 1938 with her American husband, art historian Robert Goldwater. Her first solo exhibition of Abstract Expressionist paintings appeared at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in 1945. Not long after, she transitioned to sculpture, first using wood to create totemic shapes such as "Spiral Woman"—a six-foot abstraction of a moving female figure—and later using bronze and marble to forge darker pieces like 1967's "The End of Softness." In the 1960s, she flirted with the idea of becoming a child psychologist. She stuck with art, obviously, but her sculptures often draw on memories of her childhood and symbolize sexuality interplayed with innocence. More recently, massive creepy sculptures of spiders have become her signature.

Bourgeois was the subject of a retrospective at the MoMA in New York in 1982, represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1993, and had a major retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in Spring '08. She is represented by Chelsea's Cheim & Reid, and prominent collectors of her work include Aby Rosen, Donald Rubell, and Francois Pinault, who have helped her elevate prices to eye-watering levels—in 2005, one of her bronze spiders went for $3 million at Sotheby's, then the following year a similar, but smaller, piece went for $4 million at Christie's.

Trophy case

President Clinton awarded her the National Medal of the Arts, the nation's highest honor for visual arts, in 1997.

Personal

Bourgeois and Goldwater adopted a son, Michel, in 1940, and had two more children, Jean-Louis and Alain, soon after. Goldwater died in 1973, and Bourgeois now lives on West 23rd Street.

Family ties

In October 2006, her son Jean-Louis purchased a historic building in the West Village that used to house a porn store and a gay bar for $2.2 million; he's now planning to turn it into a museum "dedicated to water." Mom, who put up the cash to buy the house, has agreed to design a waterfall for the space.

No joke

Bourgeois has been an insomniac since 1939. In 2003, the Whitney showcased a set of the drawings she made during nights in which she had trouble sleeping.