Big Blue Pink from the Flesh Gardens series
On View at the Getty Center: Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970
Judy Chicago made her Flesh Gardens series while directing the first Feminist Art Program at California State University in Fresno. Like the other paintings in the series, Big Blue Pink employs a geometric grid to contain areas of soft color that dissolve into white light. This contrast between openness and confinement suggests a rippling, pulsating organism or landscape. Chicago would later feel that the formal abstraction of this and related works was insufficient for furthering her political goals, and she soon began to make more explicitly feminist work.