At the beginning of her professional career, Chicago created a significant body of minimal art which, for a long time, remained unknown even though her work had been included in the influential 1965 exhibition, Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York. In 2002, several of her pieces were featured in A Minimal Future at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. This show stimulated a new interest in Chicago’s early work and in 2004, a major survey of her minimal work was exhibited at the LewAllen Gallery in Santa Fe, NM.
In the accompanying catalogue, Jenni Sorkin, curator of the exhibition, wrote:
“While Judy Chicago is best known as a pioneering feminist artist, the first decade of her artistic production is among the most complex, interesting, and unknown periods of her career. From 1965 to 1973, she created drawings, paintings, and sculpture that demonstrated her affinity for exploring color through a very reduced formal vocabulary of geometric shapes… For Chicago, minimalism was more than a phase, it was a formative approach the artist integrated into her later work. The seemingly dramatic shift and direction of her work after 1973 is not at all as discordant as it appears; rather, it was a gradual process which is easily illuminated and traced through the development of the work made between 1965 and 1973. Prior to developing the lexicon of vaginal or ‘core’ imagery that was to occupy her for most of the 1970 s, Chicago’s content was about testing the limits of color through self-designed diagrams, systems and spatial patterning… Chicago’s production during the late 1960s and early 1970s represents a passionate and original pursuit of the experiential nature of color, transformation, and visual perception”.
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Judy Chicago with Aluminum Rearrangeable Game Board, c. 1965.
Judy Chicago with Zig Zag and Trinity, c. 1965.
Judy Chicago with 10 Part Cylinders, 1966.
Installation view of 10 Part Cylinders, 1966.
Judy Chicago with 10 Part Cylinders from the exhibition Judy Chicago: Los Angeles at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles, CA. 2019. Photo © Donald Woodman/ ARS, New York
Installation view of Sunset Squares, Trinity, and Zig Zag from the exhibition Judy Chicago: Los Angeles at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles, CA. 2019. Photo © Donald Woodman/ ARS, New York
Installation view of Rainbow Pickett and Trinity.
Installation view of Trinity and Rainbow Pickett in the exhibition Chicago in L.A.: Judy Chicago’s Early Work, 1963–74 at Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, April 4 – September 28, 2014. Photo © Donald Woodman/ ARS, New York
Installation view of Zig Zag from the exhibition Judy Chicago in Glass at Nina Johnson Gallery in Miami, FL. 2021. Photo © Donald Woodman/ ARS, New York
Installation view of Sunset Squares from the exhibition Human Geometries at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco, CA. 2021. Photo © Donald Woodman/ ARS, New York
Installation view of Rainbow Pickett, Birth Hood, Bigamy Hood, Sky Flesh, and Big Blue Pink in the exhibition Judy Chicago: A Retrospective at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, CA. 2021. Photo © Donald Woodman/ ARS, New York
Installation view of 3.5.5 Acrylic Shapes, Pasadena Lifesavers Red Series #2, Pasadena Lifesavers Yellow Series #2, and Pasadena Lifesavers Blue Series #2 in the exhibition Chicago in L.A.: Judy Chicago’s Early Work, 1963–74 at Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, April 4 – September 28, 2014. Photo © Donald Woodman/ ARS, New York
Installation view of Blue-Green Domes, Pasadena Lifesavers Red Series #2, Pasadena Lifesavers Yellow Series #2, and Pasadena Lifesavers Blue Series #2 in the exhibition Chicago in L.A.: Judy Chicago’s Early Work, 1963–74 at Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, April 4 – September 28, 2014. Photo © Donald Woodman/ ARS, New York
Installation view of Iridescent Domes #2 (small) and Large Dome Drawing #4 in the exhibition Chicago in L.A.: Judy Chicago’s Early Work, 1963–74 at Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, April 4 – September 28, 2014. Photo © Donald Woodman/ ARS, New York
Installation view of Iridescent Domes #2 (small) and Donut Drawings in the exhibition Chicago in L.A.: Judy Chicago’s Early Work, 1963–74 at Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, April 4 – September 28, 2014. Photo © Donald Woodman/ ARS, New York
Installation view of Flesh Fan.
Installation view of Sky Sun.
Installation view of Queen Victoria (Great Ladies Series), Through the Flower, Big Blue Pink, and Silver Blue Fan in the exhibition Chicago in L.A.: Judy Chicago’s Early Work, 1963–74 at Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, April 4 – September 28, 2014. Photo © Donald Woodman/ ARS, New York
Installation view of Bigamy Hood, Flight Hood, and Birth Hood in Judy Chicago: A Reckoning at Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Dec 4, 2018 – Apr 21, 2019. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio.
