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In 1965 she took a loft in Pasadena, California and devoted herself to making sculpture, which she exhibited under her married name, Judy Gerowitz. In early 1966 she made her professional debut in a solo show at Rolf Nelson Gallery in Los Angeles, where she exhibited a rearrangeable environment called Sunset Squares and a series of photos of a work entitled Rainbow Pickett (1965), a set of pastel-colored beams. That same year she sent sculpture to New York City for the Jewish Museum's show entitled "Primary Structures." In 1967 she exhibited in "Sculpture of the Sixties" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art and, in 1968, in the show entitled "West Coast Now" at the Seattle Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Art.

In 1969 the Pasadena Museum of Art presented a solo show of Judy Chicago's work that featured an ambitious series of plexiglass dome structures, arranges in groups of three and consisting of transparent surfaces containing layers of softly colored plastic. As Judy Chicago later explained in her autobiography, the melting hues of the domes' interiors signify her own "multi-orgasmic sexuality"; moreover, the three elements in each grouping represent the family constellation of mother, father, and child. Peter Selz of Art in America (November 1969) showed some sensitivity to their meanings when he commented that "the domes initially appear reductive and systematic, but soon prove lush, emotive and human."

Other critics failed to show equal perceptiveness when they evaluated the solo exhibition that she mounted the following year at the Art Gallery of California State College at Fullerton. In order to emphasize the feminine perspective of her exhibited work, she posted, outside the gallery entrance, and announcement of her legal change of name: "Judy Gerowitz hereby divests herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance and freely chooses her own name Judy Chicago." Thomas H. Garver of Artforum (January 1971) incorrectly assumed that she had adopted an alias and was exploiting the feminist movement to promote her own work. Critics compared the domes, which she included in the exhibit, to those of sculpture Craig Kauffman and dismissed Pasadena Lifesavers (1969), her first group of paintings to be shown since her graduate school days, as an uninspiring formal exercise.

The focus of Pasadena Lifesavers, however, is actually upon expression of personal emotion rather than experimentation with minimalist forms. It consists of three series of the same sequence of five pictures executed in different color schemes on sheet acrylic; each painting in the repeating sequence displays four vulviform shapes, and color schemes convey conflicting personal feelings. Judy Chicago later celebrated the emotional release that Pasadena Lifesavers afforded her by creating a series of "atmospheres," or colored smoke displays in outdoor environments, which she documented in photographs and films for her Fullerton show. Although critics applauded the atmospheres as "perceptual and spatial experiences of momentary nature but powerful impact," they failed to grasp their thematic implications.

After the Fullerton show Judy Chicago decided that her work could be better understood and accepted by a female art community. Having taken a teaching post at Fresno State College in 1970, she founded a women's art program there in which the participants developed self-confidence and self-reliance as well as technical expertise. Accompanied by some of her students, Judy Chicago moved the next year to the California Institutes of the Arts in Valencia to join artist Miriam Shapiro in establishing their Feminist Art Program, with which she worked until early 1973. For its first project the class renovated a rundown mansion in Los Angeles and turned it into Womanhouse, an environment embodying feminine fantasies about domestic interiors in rooms ranging from a "Nuturant Kitchen" to a "Lipstick Bathroom." When it was opened to the public for a month in 1972, Womanhouse attracted almost 10,000 visitors.

During her two and half years in the academic world, Judy Chicago produced art that was noteworthy for its increasingly overt feminist imagery. While at Fresno she created Fresno Fans (1970-71) and Flesh Gardens (1971), two series of large paintings on sheet acrylic. The colors of each Fan radiate outwards from the center to the edges of the format in much the same way that a woman reached out from her receptive center. The colors of each Flesh Garden oppose their soft vulnerability to the hard rigidity of its forms. While at Cal Arts she experimented with lithography, beginning with Red Flag (1971), a graphic image of a woman's hand holding a bloody tampon, and continuing with Through the Flower (1972), a series that expresses her longing to transcend the boundaries of the human condition. "To me, the flower in O'Keeffe stands for femininity," she told Lucy R. Lippard in an interview for Artforum (September 1974), "so moving through the flower is moving into some other place."

In 1972 Judy Chicago organized a nationwide Conference for Woman Artists that took place at Cal Arts, a major result of which was the creation, in 1973, of Womanspace, an exhibition space and art gallery. When Womanspace presented a show based on the theme of female sexuality, she was invited to make a contribution. She executed a huge painting on canvas entitled Let It All Hang Out (1973). Because she was, for the first time, creating specifically for a female audience that would intuitively understand her imagery, she designed a forthright symbol of her concept of herself and produced a painting combining power and vulnerability.

10   CURRENT BIOGRAPHY February 1981