Her name is synonymous with feminist art, feminist books, and the city of her birth. Judy Chicago was born Judy Cohen and then became Judy Gerowitz during her first marriage, but she legally changed her last name in 1970 to eliminate any reference to what she considered gender subservience. Chicago's long career in art has also emphasized a woman's perspective, as in her 1974 Oakland artwork, A Butterfly for Oakland, which went up near Lake Merritt and used fireworks and flares to create — just briefly, for less than 30 minutes — a large red butterfly, which represented female anatomy and female creation. Starting today, the Oakland Museum of California is doing a seven-month tribute to Chicago that revolves around her 1974 Oakland artwork, which the museum commissioned. The exhibit features digitized images of A Butterfly for Oakland that show how Chicago set the stage not just for the commissioned work but for the cascade of feminist art that followed in the next four decades.
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