Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (1911 – 2010) was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious. These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be a therapeutic process. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement. Born on December 25, 1911 in Paris, France, Bourgeois first studied mathematics at the Sorbonne before changing paths and enrolling in art school. She studied under Fernand Léger at the École des Beaux-Arts and later with Vaclav Vytlacil at the Art Students League of New York, having emigrated to the United States in 1938. Largely under appreciated during her early career, she garnered critical and public acclaim after her retrospective debuted at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1982. The artist died on May 31, 2010 in New York, NY at the age of 98 of a heart attack. Today, Bourgeois’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Kunstmuseum Basel, among others.