Grace Bakst Wapner was born February 23, 1934 in Brooklyn, the daughter of Max and Fannie Bakst. Bakst Wapner died on June 23, 2025 at her home in Woodstock. She was predeceased by her husband Jerry Wapner and survived by her brother Daniel Bakst and her children, Kenneth Wapner and Erika Degens, her grandchildren Roxanne Degens, Elijah Wapner, Jasper Degens and Rachel Wapner-Mol, two great-grandchildren, Naomi and Mira Jenke-Degens and son-in-law Sebastian Degens and daughter-in-law Corinne Mol.
Bakst Wapner attended Midwood High School in Brooklyn and Bennington College in Vermont. She had a long and fruitful career as an artist, working in a variety of materials. Her early work in the late 1960s and early 1970s was with Styrofoam, which she carved and painted to resemble rocks. In the late 1970s and 1980s her large, extravagantly beautiful and sometimes fearsome conceptual installations made from satin and velvet in bold colors, were influenced by the work of American anthropologist Edward T. Hall and pioneered the use of fabric in art. They were exhibited in New York at 55 Mercer Gallery.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Bakst Wapner turned to ceramics, adapting the classical forms of vases and urns to her own vocabulary. She also painted figurative ceramic work that reflected the complex nature of intimacy — exhibited at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery on West Broadway in Soho — and glazed and painted ceramic anthropomorphic evocations of flowers and rocks inspired by ancient Chinese and Japanese gardens.
In the 2000s she worked with painted textile wall pieces, continuing to experiment with the conceptual and minimalist ideas of her early work and incorporating the sewn and stitched approaches of her large installations. She exhibited in museums and galleries, notably at the Samuel Dorsky Museum in New Paltz, in a retrospective at the Kleinert Gallery in Woodstock, in a 2022 of a remounting of the 1971 exhibition of feminist art at the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and recent shows at Carter Burden Gallery in NYC (gracewapner.com).
Bakst Wapner was interested in almost everything. A short list of her prime passions might include: art, literature, dance, music, film, anatomy, science, politics, Judaism, her family and friends, and of course food. Her most frequent question was “What are we going to eat for dinner tonight?” Along with the nature of art, this was an endless topic of discussion. She was beloved by her family and friends who were knocked out (to coin one of her favorite expressions) by her intelligence, warmth, relentless creativity, indomitable spirit, intense loyalty, persevering interest in them and their lives, resilience, empathy and endlessly endearing fission of softness and strength.
Most recently, Bakst Wapner’s art combined fabric and ceramic, finding new forms, reinventing herself again, always questing forward, and immersing herself ever more deeply into her fascination with color, texture, the hand-hewn, the personal versus the social, high art versus craft, ancient motifs and contemporary aesthetics, and her insistence on elegance and beauty.
— Kenneth Wapner
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