Chicago’s Flashback, Version 2: 

Another print in the edition is owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Despite being included in the influential 1965 exhibition “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum in New York, Chicago’s work in Minimalism remains underappreciated or dismissed as a lesser precursor to her feminist work. Yet her investigation of the economies of line and color were intrinsic to her later explorations of female and “central core” imagery. As queer-feminist art historian Jenni Sorkin has written of Chicago’s minimalist works, “Prior to developing the lexicon of vaginal or ‘core’ imagery that was to occupy her for most of the 1970s, Chicago’s content was about testing the limits of color through self-designed diagrams, systems and spatial patterning…Chicago’s production during the late 1960s and early 1970s represents a passionate and original pursuit of the experiential nature of color, transformation, and visual perception.”