Tribeca Exhibit Celebrates Long Career of Bibi Lenček, Pioneer Feminist Artist

Bibi Lencek at the retrospective of her work, which was on view at One Art Space from May 22-25. Behind her is "Endangered," (1990-92), Flashe paint on canvas. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Family, friends, neighbors and many others gathered at a Tribeca gallery in May to celebrate the half-century career of pioneering feminist artist and longtime Tribecan Bibi Lenček. The retrospective at One Art Space was, as her sister Lena Lenček noted, “the first time in many years that we’ve been able to see so much of Bibi’s work together in one space, and to appreciate the extent and the range of her talent.”

Lenček, 76, suffers from advanced Lewy bodies dementia, which has left her with limited capacity to speak. But her face brightened amid a room filled with her life’s work—oils, pastels, prints, collages and watercolors—and the many who crowded the gallery to view it.  

The show was organized by Lena Lenček, Bibi’s daughter Katrina Lenček-Inagaki, and Bibi’s son Misko Nikko Lenček-Inagaki.

Widely exhibited and critically acclaimed, Lenček’s figurative paintings of naked couples in bed challenged the male artist convention of depicting women as idealized and eroticized objects. “I prefer to describe the eroticism of my work as ‘sensual,’” Lenček wrote in a 1979 artist’s statement. “I paint the nude and semi-nude couple as part of an ordinary domestic setting, where limbs, robes, tissue boxes, bed sheets, and wall plugs mingle in an awkward, humorous, as well as tender relationship.”

Using the delayed shutter release on her Nikon F, Lenček took the photos that would become the reference for her paintings. Her then husband, Tak Inagaki, served as her model.

“She had 30 seconds to click the shutter and we would jump into the bed and we had no way to frame it,” Inagaki told the gallery gathering. “So we had to do it many times and she explained to me at that time that the sheets were important. Not so much the naked bodies. Because sheets can tell more stories [about] what was taking place, where people were born, and make love, and die.”

A show of the work, mounted prominently at the Rutgers University library in 1975, drew protests, with one of the objectors complaining that the paintings were a “distraction, causing fantasizing,” the Rutgers student paper reported at the time. 

Lenček, who moved to her Tribeca loft in 1980, received an MFA from Columbia University and was a two-time recipient of the Fulbright Hays Fellowship. She wrote for the Women Artist’s Newsletter, a publication that from 1971 to 1983 provided a platform for women artists to share experiences and promote their work. In 1982, she helped put together a series of 16 independently curated shows called Views by Women Artists. In later years, along with her continued painting and work as a textile designer, Lenček taught art in Manhattan Youth’s after-school program. 

In an essay for the retrospective catalog, Sabra Moore, an artist and writer who worked with Lenček in those days of feminist activism, wrote that the artist’s work is “based on her life experience as a woman and the value she places on her relationship to the natural world, to the sensuality of her body, to her family and everyday experience, to plants and animals, to the clarity and joy of color and light.”