The artist Judy Chicago was delighted to see three of her car hoods holding their own in The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern, which opens on Thursday (17 September). The fourth, alas, and the only one in a museum collection so far, couldn’t make the journey from Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. Now part of art history as the Tate show underlines, the preparatory drawings for all four of Chicago's big, bold and colourful series—Flight Hood, Bigamy Hood and Birth Hood along with the missing in action Car Hood—are on show together with other examples of the artist’s early work in a solo show at Riflemaker gallery in Soho, London, which opened last night, 14 September (until 31 October). The US artist, who put feminism into the West Coast art world back in the day when the Ferus Gallery boys held sway, is in London this week. She recalls learning how to wield a spray gun in an auto-body school in Los Angeles. She was the only woman in the 250-strong class. But what did the male-dominated art world make of her art with attitude back in 1964? “Oh my god! There I was in graduate school and my male professors were shrieking in horror at the colours, the wombs and the breasts,” she recalls with glee. She who laughs last, laughs longest.
