I never met the artist Louise Bourgeois but the stories I heard made me wish I had. Full of life and working up until her final days, I admired her feisty spirit and the love and emotion she poured into her creations. I was introduced to her work with the spider that filled the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern back in 2000. I then followed her work and attended the retrospective of her work at the Guggenheim in 2008. I have been a huge fan of her work since that first introduction but it wasn’t until her death that I learned how tremendously influential and important she was to art history. In 1982 she had the first retrospective of a woman at the Museum of Modern Art. The Kiki Smiths and Lynda Benglis of the world might not have existed had it not been for Bourgeois and her organic, phallic, and sexually charged art work. Her work will live on but the spunky pint-sized woman will be sadly missed.