Keith Sonnier

Keith Sonnier (July 31, 1941 – July 18, 2020) was a postminimalist sculptor, performance artist, video, and light artist. Sonnier was one of the first artists to use light in sculpture in the 1960s. With his use of neon in combination with ephemeral materials he achieved international recognition. Sonnier was part of the Process Art movement.

Biography James Keith Sonnier was born July 31, 1941, in Mamou, Louisiana. His mother sang in a black choir and booked black bands for the town's youth centers, influencing his later work as an assistant to the head of the African Studies section of the Art History department at Rutgers University. Sonnier had two brothers, Barry Ledoux and Charles Sonnier.

He graduated in 1963 from Southwestern Louisiana Institute (now known as the University of Louisiana at Lafayette). His parents encouraged him to branch out, expand his knowledge and study French, in order to connect with his French background.

At the time of his death he lived in Bridgehampton, New York. Sonnier started moving towards the use of plastic, synthetic materials, and premade objects. Sonnier began experimenting with neon in 1968; neon lights became a signature material used in his sculptural works.

Some of his neon pieces are Lit Square, Dis-Play, Longhorn Study, and Ba-O-Ba. The Ba O Ba works consist of Sonnier’s works in neon sculpture, beginning in the sixties. The name Ba-O-Ba comes from a Haitian-Creole phrase meaning “bathing in moonlight”. In the early stages, the works were initially focused on the space of architectural interaction between horizontal planes. Sonnier eventually became more involved in large-scale publicly commissioned works, including Lightway, one of his largest installations in 1992, located in the Munich airport. One of his most notable exhibits was “Eccentric Abstraction” at the Fischbach Gallery in Manhattan, curated by Lucy Lippard in 1966.

Personal life In 1966, he married the sculptor Jackie Winsor, who at the time was a fellow art student from Rutgers University.

His second marriage was in 1987 to writer and curator, Nessia Leonzini Pope, ending in divorce by 1998. He had one child from his second marriage.