Lynda Benglis (Lake Charles, Louisiana, born 1941) is an American sculptor and visual artist. She is best known for her wax paintings, her latex sculptures and her 1970s photo-performances, in which she parodied sexual and gender stereotypes. After graduating from Newcomb College in New Orleans in 1964, she moved to New York, where she met artists such as Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Eva Hesse and Barnett Newman.
During her training she studied ceramics and painting at Newcomb College and later painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. Her early works used beeswax; in the 1970s she worked with large polyurethane pieces and later with gold leaf, zinc and aluminium. Her latex and polyurethane pourings of the late 1960s and 1970s marked her entry into the New York art scene. In works such as Fallen Painting (1968) and Contraband she took Jackson Pollock's dripping onto the floor, making the act of pouring her method. These organic, brightly coloured pieces aimed to disrupt a male-dominated Minimalism.
In the 1970s she turned to video, producing more than a dozen works between 1972 and 1977, and in the mid-1980s she began working with metal casting, mainly for public fountains. She taught or was a visiting artist at several universities, including Rochester, Princeton and Arizona.
Her series of magazine advertisements is perhaps her most controversial intervention. In the one published in Artforum in November 1974, she posed with a latex dildo and sunglasses to promote an exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery. Rosalind Krauss and other staff members of the magazine harshly criticised it, while Robert Morris's advertisement from the same month drew little comment. Benglis read this as evidence that male artists were encouraged to promote themselves while women were punished for doing so. She then made five lead sculptures, each titled Smile, one for each editor who had complained.
After years of limited attention, in 2009 the Irish Museum of Modern Art organised a forty-year retrospective that reaffirmed her as a leading figure in contemporary art. Benglis lives between New York, Santa Fe, Kastellorizo and Ahmedabad.