CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Chicago Comes to Los Angeles

California’s conservative politicians could not slow the radical shift in consciousness that had taken place since the collapse of Kennedy’s Camelot. One artist who embraced this change was Judy Cohen, who was born to activist Jewish parents in Chicago in 1939. Her youthful desire to become an artist could only be described as a drive. As an undergraduate at UCLA, she was a classmate of Vija Celmins, and even her teachers were daunted by her apparent ambition.

An irrepressible personality, round-figured with mounds of springy brown hair, Cohen was still in the UCLA art department when she married aspiring songwriter Jerry Gerowitz in 1961. The couple moved to a house in Topanga Canyon where, just two years later, driving the treacherous curving road there, his car went over a steep embankment and he was killed. Devastated, she allowed herself a period of mourning before returning to her studies at UCLA with greater resolve. She rented an apartment in a building in Santa Monica owned and designed by architect Frank Gehry, whose brother-in-law Rolf Nelson would show her work in his new gallery at 669 North La Cienega Boulevard.

The first paintings completed after her husband’s death were biomorphic abstractions based on her own anatomy that disturbed her mostly male professors. “I had no idea it would be provocative because I was not thinking about how others might respond but rather about my own pain and grief and how to express that,” she said later.1 Still unsure of her direction, she retreated from these personal themes to complete a group of rectilinear painted sculptures. Relying on amphetamines, she worked eighteen hours a day to get ready for her master of fine arts show in 1964. She was rewarded for her efforts when Irwin looked around carefully before saying to her, “It’s a damn fine show.”2

She hung out with the Ferus boys, as well as with Rolf Nelson’s boys, at Barney’s, where she wore work boots and smoked cigars to fit in with her male colleagues. “They spent most of their time talking about cars, motorcycles, women, and their ‘joints.’ … They made a lot of cracks about my being a woman and repeatedly stated that women couldn’t be artists. I was determined to convince them … that I was serious.”3

By 1965, John Coplans was finding greater success as an art critic and curator than as an artist. At forty-three, twice divorced, he began dating Gerowitz, then twenty-four. Both Jewish, they also shared social and political interests. He tended to be combative, and so did she. Though he bought her art materials and took her to dinner, he remarked, “You know, Judy, you have to decide whether you’re going to be a woman or an artist.”4 Their relationship soon ended but they remained friends. Four years later, Coplans organized a show of her work at the Pasadena Art Museum. And when she went to New York, he set up a meeting with the powerful critic Harold Rosenberg, who, though married, tried to seduce her. She returned to Los Angeles after the meeting, thinking “the new world really is the West Coast.”5

Influenced by Leider’s Artforum article “The Cool School,” praising the efforts of Bengston, Bell, and Kauffman, Gerowitz decided to attend an auto-body school to learn to spray paint on metal. The only woman among 250 men in the class, she enjoyed a fling with the African American instructor, who drove a lavender convertible. She applied her new painting skills specifically in her 1964 work Car Hood. She described it: “The vaginal form, penetrated by a phallic arrow, was mounted on the ‘masculine’ hood of a car, a very clear symbol of my state of mind at this time.”6 She kept striving to gain acceptance into the inner circle of Ferus bad boys. One night at Barney’s, she got drunk enough to thank Bengston for influencing her work. Far from flattered, he dismissed her as a “flash in the pan.”7

By that time, her earlier friendship with sculptor Lloyd Hamrol, who had divorced his wife Nancy, had taken a romantic turn and in 1965, the couple rented a five-thousand-square-foot loft on Raymond Avenue in Pasadena for seventy-five dollars, which they shared with Llyn Foulkes. They had found similar loft space for di Suvero. (Ruscha had briefly rented a three-thousand-square-foot studio in Pasadena but felt his work was overwhelmed by the enormity and moved his studio to an apartment on Western Avenue in East Hollywood that he kept for twenty years.)

Around that time, Gerowitz met Stanley and Elyse Grinstein at a party. Elyse said that until she met Judy, she wore a girdle and carried a handbag to match her shoes. The Grinsteins became her patrons, and one of their first gestures was to send a set of white porcelain dishes to the young couple’s loft.

At her first solo show in January 1966 at Nelson’s gallery, she wore a backless tuxedo of her own design. Rainbow Pickett, named after Wilson Pickett, consisted of six trapezoids of different lengths and pastel colors leaned against a wall at an angle in decreasing size. They were not airbrushed but made of painted canvas stretched over plywood forms. Her unpleasant encounter with Bengston had had an impact.

“I’m finished with the kind of surface & craft preoccupation of the Ferus boys,” she wrote. “It’s a dead end that leads to preciousness, & they’re really fucked up by it.”8 These sculptures evolved during the earliest years of Minimalism but, as her biographer Gail Levin wrote, “Her developing feminist ideas were expressed indirectly in her choices of soft, feminine colors.”9 Kynaston McShine selected Rainbow Pickett for the breakthrough Primary Structures show at the Jewish Museum in New York that opened on April 26, 1966. Developed with Lucy Lippard, then at the Museum of Modern Art, the landmark show also included work by Bell and John McCracken, along with Andre, Smithson, Robert Morris, and Walter De Maria.

Judy Chicago with her sculpture 10 Part Cylinders, 1966

Photograph courtesy of Through the Flower Archives

Due to Gerowitz’s flat Midwestern accent, in 1966 Rolf Nelson started calling her Judy Chicago, and soon she started listing herself that way in the phone book. Nelson had moved to a larger gallery and in his empty room, Chicago and Hamrol erected plastic inflatable walls and filled the space with three hundred pounds of chicken feathers. Amusing and somehow in tune with the times, it garnered the publicity that she was increasingly adept at attracting. This was especially important after Nelson was forced to close his gallery at the end of 1966 due to mounting financial losses. His 736 North La Cienega Boulevard gallery had featured shows of Herms, Foulkes, and Hamrol. Nelson even convinced Georgia O’Keeffe to lend her monumental masterpiece Sky Above Clouds IV with a price tag of $75,000, but no one in Los Angeles, not even the new museum, bought it. Later, it went to the Art Institute of Chicago. Meanwhile, Eugenia Butler and Riko Mizuno had taken over his previous space and named it Gallery 669 for the address. They showed watercolors by the author Henry Miller, who later titled a book of his work Paint As You Like and Die Happy.

A number of artists were interested in moving out of the confines of their studios and into the industrial environment. Chicago, Hamrol, Oliver Andrews, Eric Orr, DeWain Valentine, and others formed a cooperative called Aesthetic Research Center in 1966. All wanted to be involved in new technological discoveries.10 Around Christmas 1967, Hamrol and Orr helped Chicago manifest Dry Ice Environment at Century City, with thirty-seven tons of dry ice donated by the Union Carbide Company producing thick mist when stacked into low walls and ziggurats. They were inspired by Allan Kaprow, who had conceived the Happening in New York ten years before as a combination of his interests in the work of John Cage, Zen Buddhism, absurdist theater, and poetry, and to break down the barrier between art and life.

Kaprow’s first survey exhibition had been held in September 1967 at PAM with a Happening called Fluids. For three days, volunteers stacked blocks of ice in rectangular arrangements some thirty feet long, ten feet wide, and eight feet high throughout the city. In the sweltering heat, the sculptures quickly attained the fluidity promised in the title but lived on in the many photographs of the event taken by Dennis Hopper.

Chicago was slowly coming to the realization that her experience as a woman was not legible in her work, yet she didn’t want to be labeled a “woman artist,” either. In 1968, she refused to be included in California Women in the Arts, an exhibition organized by Josine Ianco-Starrels, director of the Lytton Center, saying, “I won’t show in any group defined as women, Jewish or California.”11

Chicago and Hamrol married in 1969. The following year, with some reservations, she accepted a teaching position at Fresno State College, two hundred miles north of Los Angeles. Far from urban influence, Chicago pulled together all of her diverse ideas about the suppressed role of women in art history and in society to form the first Women’s Art Program. Chicago invited her friend the artist Miriam Schapiro up to Fresno to observe classes of woman exploring their history, their place in society, their personal assets, and their liabilities as professional artists. Schapiro suggested moving the program down to the newly opened California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, where her husband, painter Paul Brach, was dean. In 1971, Chicago and Schapiro launched the Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts. It proved deeply influential for artists of both sexes and inspired a plethora of similar programs at art schools and universities around the country.

In Los Angeles, it led to the founding of Womanhouse, where female artists could exhibit their work without the pressures to conform that came from commercial galleries, which rarely showed their work in any case.