Anne Truitt

First, 1961, Baltimore Museum of Art Truitt's first wood sculpture looks like a short stretch of white picket fence, three uneven pickets a little under four feet tall. Unlike most of the work on this list, it lets memory in: Truitt later described asking herself what she loved and arriving at the fields, fences and boards of her childhood. Notice how a plainly painted object can still carry a familiar shape. Her later sculptures became tall wooden columns built up in layer on layer of acrylic paint, and they reward a slow walk around all four sides. She was one of only three women in the influential 1966 Primary Structures exhibition in New York. First belongs to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it is not currently on view.