GILLIAN JAGGER (d: 2019), on this date in  New York. She was a British, multimedia sculptor and installation artist based in the  Hudson Valley. She is known for her plaster castings of manhole covers on the streets of New York City in the 1960s, during which time she was “erroneously being identified as a Pop artist.” In her work Jagger “[appropriates] materials from nature,” and incorporates tracings, rubbings, and castings of found objects in both urban and rural environments.

Her father was sculptor Charles Sergeant Jagger, was known for his war memorials , most notably the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park in London. Jagger’s maternal grandmother was also a sculptor. After the death of her father Jagger’s mother remarried, when she was aged 7, to an American coal industrialist and the family relocated to Buffalo, New York.

The artist worked and resided in a converted “five-barn” dairy farm in Kerhonkson, New York with her wife Consuelo (Connie) Mander since 1978.

Jagger received her BFA in painting at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University), where artist Andy Warhol was also an alumnus. Although Jagger and Warhol were contemporaries and friends, Jagger disaffiliated herself from the Pop Art movement associated with Warhol. She wrote, “...the worse  for me was that I was identified in all those news programmes and newspapers as a “Pop artist”. I was certain I wasn’t. I didn’t know much about Pop Art. But I knew that I did not like beer cans or pieces of pie under plastic covers.“

Jagger died after a brief illness in Ellenville, New York.