NEW YORK, NY.- Jackie Winsor, a Canadian-born American sculptor who animated the coolly masculine and factory-polished surfaces of minimalism with a sense of new life, coaxed from natural materials including fiber, wooden logs and thick, bristly rope, died Monday in New York City. She was 82.

Her death, in a hospital, came after a severe stroke and a brain hemorrhage, according to her niece Jackie Brogna.

A leading figure on the New York art scene, Winsor was the first female sculptor to be given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. She was acclaimed as a post-minimalist, an overly broad label that can refer to most any artist who arrived on the scene in the late 1960s and bemoaned the severity of minimalist reduction.

Winsor quickly distinguished herself from the pack. In contrast to Donald Judd, her neighbor in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, who outsourced much of his work to industrial fabricators, Winsor could typically be found in her studio creating enigmatic, obsessively crafted objects. She hammered, drilled, coiled yards of heavy rope and chopped up plywood with a firefighter’s hatchet.

She was neither prolific nor attention-seeking. She worked at a slow pace and seldom made more than three medium- to large-size sculptures a year. Critics trying to describe her process often reached for old-timey metaphors. She was compared to “a Yankee pioneer” and to her seafaring Canadian ancestors, whose ships would be tethered to docks with thick ropes.

She was probably best known for “Bound Square” (1972), a seemingly simple form rife with subtle poetry. At first it looks like nothing so much as a humongous picture frame, measuring about 6 feet by 6 feet, for a family of giants. Composed of four long wooden logs that are secured at the corners with bulbous, tightly wrapped twine, it leans against a wall when displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, as if awaiting an installation crew. It can put one in mind of old bones and joints — even swollen, arthritic joints — but also evoke the satisfaction that comes from holding a body in balance.

The center of “Bound Square” is empty, which is true of most of Winsor’s works despite their astonishingly varied forms. She specialized in one-of-a-kind pieces that began with familiar geometric shapes (namely, cubes and spheres) and that would then be alchemized into something exotic. She made carpentered boxes that she variously burned, blew up or dragged through the streets. She added tiny square windows to the sides of mirrored cubes and gold-leaf spheres, inviting the viewer to peer inside and see that geometric structures can have a rich interior life.

Tall, striking and unusually athletic, Winsor had brown hair and clear blue eyes. She nurtured a passion for gymnastics and, until ill health interfered, visited a gym in midtown Manhattan several times a week.

“It was fantastic,” recalled Mary Miss, a close friend and sculptor who began accompanying Winsor on her outings in the 1970s. “We did rings and trapeze and tumbling and handstands.”

Winsor liked to go out afterward for a bowl of borscht at a deli, she said, and then walk the several miles to her loft on Mercer Street, where she lived for decades.

Lois Lane, an artist who also accompanied Winsor to the gym and swung on the trapeze, said, “I think her work was both muscular and mysterious, and Jackie as a person embodied those qualities as well.”

Vera Jacqueline Winsor was born on Oct. 20, 1941, in St. John’s, Newfoundland, a fishing capital of Canada. She grew up in a working-class family, the middle of three girls. Her father, Jonathan Winsor, was a factory foreperson with an interest in engineering; her mother, Annie Louise (Wicks) Winsor, looked after the home.

“By the time I was 13, we had lived in 13 houses, and my father had built one house completely,” Winsor once recalled in an interview with Whitney Chadwick. “All Newfies” — a nickname for Newfoundlanders — “of the male gender were carpenters; it’s just part of their trade, so construction was familiar. In my childhood, I was as familiar with a plumb and square as I was with oatmeal.”

Seeking to escape the bleak winters of Newfoundland, her parents eventually moved south — or rather as far south as Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the family had relatives who offered the promise of lodgings. In high school, Winsor started taking classes at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston (now the Massachusetts College of Art and Design), where she studied figure painting. It was not until she headed to graduate school at Rutgers University, in 1965, that she turned to sculpture. Rutgers, as Winsor saw it, was just a bus ride away from the New York art scene.

She received her Master of Fine Arts in 1967, by which time she had met Joan Snyder, an abstract painter, and Keith Sonnier, a sculptor, whom she married in 1966. After graduation, the three artists moved to New York.

They lived in a loft building on Mulberry Street, on the corner of Canal. It was “noisy as hell, like living in a tin can,” Sonnier recalled. The building had only one bathroom, until Philip Glass, an experimental composer and a part-time plumber, was hired to improve the facilities. “Jackie and Keith ran in other circles than myself, more hip circles,” Snyder recalled in an email.

Winsor became a regular presence at 112 Greene St., an artist-run alternative space that gave equal prominence to sculptors and avant-garde dancers. Winsor, who said her favorite artist at the time was choreographer Yvonne Rainer, once staged a performance across two floors of the building, with a female dancer slowly handing 500 pounds of rope to a male dancer on the floor above through an opening in the ceiling.

On another occasion, she exhibited her “Solid Cement Sphere” (1971), which she designed to equal her own weight of 150 pounds. “No one ever saw it because it rolled off into a corner,” she recalled in a podcast interview with critic Tyler Green.

Her marriage ended in 1980, although Winsor remained close to Sonnier, who died in 2020. In addition to Brogna, she is survived by her two sisters, Maxine Holmberg and Gloria Christie, as well as two other nieces and three nephews.

Winsor exhibited with the Paula Cooper Gallery, a leading champion of minimalism and its many offshoots, for a half-century. She had 12 solo shows at the gallery, in SoHo, since 1973 — relatively few, considering the length of her career.

“Jackie wasn’t concerned with making work for shows, per se,” Cooper said. “She was not interested in money, in fame, in museum shows. She was a pure, spiritual person. She didn’t have the same aspirations that other artists have. She didn’t have that kind of ego.”

Winsor usually returned to her native Newfoundland in the summer months, staying in a cottage she had inherited from her grandmother in Burnt Point, a fishing community overlooking Conception Bay, on the island’s southeastern coast. She sometimes returned with one of her sisters, but usually she made the trip alone.

One story about her girlhood that she was fond of relating involved a request from her father to help with a building chore. He asked her to nail something in place. Although the job required no more than a few nails, Winsor, at age 9, hammered 12 pounds of nails into wood, giving a hint of a future aesthetic that was the opposite of easy to assemble and that came without instructions.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.