Judy Chicago’s Lipstick Sculptures at the Rolf Nelson Gallery: Ambiguities between Minimal Art, Pop, and Environments

Abstract

In 1966 Judy Chicago made a series of three sculptures, each consisting of a group of circular columns ranging in height from two to nine inches. Formal variations among the three Untitled works reveal a playful oscillation between representational subject matter and abstract forms. These exquisite works have been absent from Chicago historiography, and we do not know their whereabouts. But the Rolf Nelson Gallery records at the Getty Research Institute contain several photographs of these sculptures. They are valuable resources that provide new insights into Chicago’s practice during the mid-1960s and the challenges she faced as a woman artist working in a male-dominated art world. More broadly, the sculptures speak to the stylistic ambiguities among the registers of minimal art, pop art, and environments, and to artists’ interest in sexually allusive subject matter that questions static, binary, and hierarchical conceptions of gender.