Untitled Donut Drawing

Judy Chicago’s six-decade career is rooted in resolutely material explorations with powerful visual impact. Chicago’s paintings, drawings, and sculptures of the 1960s were effused with color uncharacteristic of the dominant Minimalist style. As is evident in the Prismacolor pencil lines that shift tone in sections of Untitled Donut Drawing, Chicago’s exacting hand traces what she called “central-core” imagery that would align with her ideas of representing women in art in the coming years.

In the context of this exhibition, Chicago’s best-known work, The Dinner Party (1974–79), evinces a powerful inversion of art hierarchies by elevating the achievements of women throughout Western history through needlework and ceramics, art practices shaped by women but traditionally seen as less valuable than the work of male painters and sculptors. Chicago crucially envisioned this project as a correction to museums; 2020 marks the fortieth anniversary of the artwork’s original visit to the Brooklyn Museum on its community-funded, fourteen-venue, tri-continental tour.