Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010)
Filed under the name Louise · March 30, 2026
Louise Bourgeois built giant spider sculptures that turned into some of the most recognizable, influential works in modern art, and honestly, turning something most people find creepy into a globally beloved artistic symbol is a rebrand so successful that every startup founder I know would sell an organ for that kind of pivot. She's French-American, spent decades building a body of work that's still shaping how people think about sculpture, which is a career arc that makes my own 'failed startup, then a stable fintech job' story look extremely modest by comparison. But I appreciate the underlying move either way: taking something people are instinctively uneasy about — spiders, or in my case, admitting on stage that you bombed — and turning it into the actual point of the work instead of hiding it. Bourgeois apparently spent her whole career doing exactly that, unafraid of the strange thing everyone else flinched from. That's a braver comedy bit than anything I've ever written, frankly, just made out of bronze instead of words.