I first fell in love with Terry Lee Maker’s artwork after seeing her massive Cowgirl Hat Ball, a giant sphere made from 500 cowboy hats that was shown at the Longmont Museum of Art in Colorado.
Maker was born and raised in Abilene, Texas, to parents who built, from the ground up, three mom-and-pop motels in the 1950s. The Sweeney family spent a great deal of time on road trips throughout the Southwest, so there’s a warm spot in my memory for these accommodations, with their neon signs and kidney-shaped pools, that dotted the landscape along Route 66. Maker went on to earn her MFA at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Denver has been her home base ever since. During her more than 50-year artist career, her work has been exhibited extensively in museums and galleries both nationally and internationally.
It’s hard to imagine the struggle that women artists had to endure in order to get even the smallest slice of the art world pie during the 1970s. Terry Lee Maker has been creating fresh, innovative, process-heavy work for over a half-century, and her work has never stopped progressing. Maker assembles construction materials, cardboard, paper, and texts from both religious and scientific essays, then drills, grinds, presses, and scrapes them into exquisite precious stones, universes, and objects of beauty. Her current sculptures and wall pieces spotlight the circle, “A shape that,” she says, “is both a conceptual building block and a formalist end in itself.”…