Niki de Saint Phalle

Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle survived a traumatic childhood and married young, bearing two children before she began making art in a naïve, experimental style. The early work was angry: assemblages she attacked with firearms. Those gave way to the Nanas - whimsical, large-scale sculptures of animals, monsters, and female figures - and eventually to the Tarot Garden, a sprawling sculpture park of house-sized creations. She had no formal training but moved easily among contemporaries like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage, and worked for decades alongside Swiss kinetic artist Jean Tinguely, who became her second husband. Her hand-illustrated books and letters looked childish but tackled hard global problems in a voice that refused to soften. The experimental materials - airborne glass fibers, petrochemical fumes - slowly poisoned her, bringing chronic illness in her later years, but she kept working until she died in 2002.