My Books
Transformative Objects and the Aesthetics of Play: Louise Bourgeois's Sculpture, 1947-2000
This book considers the sculpture of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) in light of psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott's (1896-1971) radical ideas regarding transitional objects, potential space, and play, offering a model for exploring the complex and psychologically evocative work Bourgeois produced from 1947 to 2000.
The book demonstrates how Bourgeois's transformative sculptural objects and environments are invested in object relations, both psychical and tangible, and explores Bourgeois's contention that the observer physically engage with the intricate sculptural objects and architectural spaces she produced.
Objects and Other Things: Materiality and Imagination in Contemporary American Sculpture
(working title)
Objects and Other Things frames late modern and contemporary sculpture as a series of open-ended and porous encounters. By “encounter,” I mean aesthetic experiences that intermingle psychological, social, cultural, and embodied qualities and perceptions viewed through the lenses of feminist, queer, and disability theories.
Building upon conversations generated in my first book on Louise Bourgeois, Objects and Other Things untangles how materiality and imagination participate in our embodied encounters with aesthetic objects and things we might deem unsettling, misfitting, wondrous, meditative, even sublime.The manuscript examines sculptural and feminist production by artists Ruth Asawa, Jackie Winsor, Elizabeth King, and Julia Phillips, among others.
The POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street
Brooklyn, NY
7 - 9 pm
April 17, 2025
Montclair Book Center
221 Glenridge Avenue
Montclair, NJ
2 - 4 pm
May 17, 2025
Book Talks & Events
"How can a work of art be at once completely an object and not merely an object? Somers shows, thrillingly, how works by Louise Bourgeois evoke the transitional objects that mediate our earliest encounters with the world.
Transformative Objects is at once an incisive study of a major artist, a lucid introduction to object relations theory, and a richly immersive experience in its own right."
Douglas Mao, Russ Family Professor in the Humanities and Film and Media Program Chair, Johns Hopkins University, USA
"Louise Bourgeois once said in an interview: ‘I carry my psychoanalysis within the work’. In this intricate and lively study, Lynn Somers stages encounters with Bourgeois’s images and objects that reveal how this psychoanalysis emerges from and embraces that work."
Naomi Segal, Professor Emerita, Institute of Languages, Cultures & Societies, University of London, UK
Praise for Transformative Objects
“Affect, Attachment, and Loss: The Material Objects of Art History and Psychoanalysis,” chap. in The Routledge Companion to Marxisms in Art History, eds. Brian Winkenweder and Tijen Tunali (Routledge 2025)
“Aesthetics of Disability and the Hybrid Body in Louise Bourgeois’s Femme Maison,” chap. in Disability and Art History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century, eds. Elizabeth Howie and Ann Millett-Gallant (Routledge 2022)
“Louise Bourgeois’s Janus, (De-)Sublimation, and Empathy,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 19, Special issue on Sublimation: Redefining Materiality in Art after Modernism/Sublimierung: Neubestimmungen von Materialität in der Kunst nach dem Modernismus, vol. 19, eds. Christian Berger and Annika Schlitte (Felix Meiner Verlag 2021)
“Louise Bourgeois’s Melancholy Objects to be Used,” chap. in Modernist Objects, eds. Noëlle Cuny and Xavier Kalck (Clemson University Press 2020)
“A Taste for Sham: Examples of Perversion and Suffering in Contemporary Art,” chap. in Dialectical Conversions: Donald Kuspit’s Art Criticism, eds. David Craven and Brian Winkenweder (Liverpool University Press 2011)
Edited Volumes
(PEER REVIEWED)
“Imperfectly ‘Remembered’: Louise Bourgeois’s Objects to be Used,” RoundTable 2, no. 1; online special issue on Memory, Roehampton University and Fincham Press (November 2019)
“What I’m Reading: Lynn M. Somers,” Art Journal Open (February 2017)
“Fauvism,” “Neo-Impressionism,” and “Georges-Pierre Seurat,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, general editor Stephen Ross (Routledge 2017)
“Diane Arbus,” “Nancy Burson,” and “William Christenberry,” in Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography, ed. Lynne Warren (Routledge 2005)
“Abstract Expressionism,” “Ann Hamilton,” “Minimalism,” and “Postmodernism,” in The Encyclopedia of Sculpture, ed. Antonia Boström (Routledge 2003)
Contributed Essays
(PEER REVIEWED)
Panel Convener: The Work of Sculpture: Object Encounters within Art History and Everyday Life. Association for Art History, UK, Annual Conference, University of York, UK (April 2025)
Panel Convener: Beyond Luxury, or, How to Use a Work of Art. ASAP/15: Not a Luxury, CUNY Graduate Center and Park Avenue Armory, New York, NY (October 2024)
“False Fronts and Dead Ends: Walker Evans’s Vernacular Modernism” (paper). Fourth International Conference of the French Society for Modernist Studies / Société d’études modernists, Université de Caen, Normandy, France (June 2022)
“The Object Relations of Prosthetic Life: Thinking and Feeling through Things” (paper). Unlearn the Body: New Approaches on Disability and Art History, Institute of Art History, University of Zürich, Switzerland (June 2022)
Panel Convener: Critical Perspectives on Disability in Art and Visual Culture. Association For Art History, UK, Annual Conference (April 2022, online event)
“From Kernel to Shell: Louise Bourgeois’s Lairs” (paper). Pockets, Pouches and Secret Drawers, Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, School of Advanced Study, University of London (December 2021, online event)
Panel Convener: Material/Immaterial: The Lives (and Afterlives) of Objects. Paper: "Matters of Darkness: Rothko's Late Works as Transformational Objects" Association for Art History, UK Annual Conference. (April 2021, online event)
“Empathy in American Sculpture Since the 1960s” (paper). Panel: Other Phenomenologies in American Art, College Art Association 107th Annual Conference, New York (February 2019)
“Reflections on Slow Empathy in American Sculpture Since the 1960s” (paper). Slow: A Symposium in Praxis & Theory. Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA (November 2019)
“Sculpture as Liminal Object: Louise Bourgeois’s Janus” (paper). On the Threshold: Liminality in Theory and Art Historical Praxis. 20th Conference of the Austrian Art Historians Association (VöKK), Vienna (October 2019)
“Louise Bourgeois’s Janus and Selfobject Transference” (paper). Vienna – Kohut – Self Psychology: Searching for Creativity in Times of Crisis. 41st International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology (IAPSP) Conference, co-sponsored by Vienna Circle for Psychoanalysis and Selfpsychology and Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy + Psychoanalysis, Vienna (October 2018)
“Louise Bourgeois’s Melancholy Objects to be Used” (paper). Modernist Objects. Third International Conference of the French Society for Modernist Studies / Société d’études modernistes, Paris Sorbonne University (June 2018)
“Resistances to Knowing and Being: L.B.” (paper). Intersections of Resistance in the Space Between, 1914 – 1945. 20th Annual Conference of the Space Between Society and The Feminist inter/Modernist Association, University of Northern Colorado (June 2018)
“Louise Bourgeois’s Janus: A Case for Psychoanalytic Sublimation” (paper). Sublimation – Mind, Matter, Concept in Art after Modernism. Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz and Kunsthalle Mainz (December 2017)
“Walker Evans’s Subway Portraits: Concealing and Revealing Photographic Facts” (paper). Under Surveillance in the Space Between Literature and Culture, 1914 – 1945. 18th Annual Conference of the Space Between Society, McGill University, Montreal (June 2016)
“Home is Where We Start From”: Nostalgia and Domesticity in the Early Work of Louise Bourgeois (paper). At Home in the Space Between Literature and Culture, 1914 – 1945, 17th Annual Conference of the Space Between Society, University of Notre Dame (June 2015)
“Temporality, Trace, and Ambivalence in the Work of Sally Mann” (paper). Palimpsest: The Layered Object. Fifth Biennial Art History Symposium
Savannah College of Art and Design (February/March 2014)
“Psychoanalysis as Art and Cure: Louise Bourgeois from Beginning to End” (paper). Future Bourgeois: Symposium and Workshop, Organized by ARTIST ROOMS Research Partnership, The Fruitmarket Gallery and the National Gallery of Modern Art, Scotland, Edinburgh (February 2014)