Judy Chicago2013

Unlike the sculpture of her male Los Angeles contemporaries, Chicago's early sculptures and paintings reveled in bodily--specifically genital--references that distanced her from their concerns and instead began to define the possibilities of a new feminist art. This phase in Chicago's career, sometimes described as her Minimal Period, produced several innovative series: the Hood paintings on Chevy car hoods, which featured heavily stylized vaginas and penises in brightly colored mirrored patterns; abstract sculptural game boards that riffed on children's games and building blocks; several series of small, iridescent acrylic domes arranged in groups of three; and the Flesh Gardens and Fresno Fan series of sprayed acrylic lacquer on acrylic and Prismacolor on paper. Many of these early works...