3 Star Cunts

Judy Chicagos 3 Star Cunts from 1969 is a colored pencil drawing over graphite on cream wove paper that exemplifies the early phase of the artists career, when she was producing works of Minimalist abstraction that subtly encoded feminist content into the formal vocabulary of West Coast Hard-Edge painting. The title, which uses a vulgarity for female genitalia to name a geometric composition of three pointed star forms, is a direct challenge to the masculinist conventions of the Minimalist and Hard-Edge painting movements that dominated the Los Angeles art scene in the late 1960s, asserting that the geometric forms of hard-edge abstraction could be read as references to female anatomy rather than the neutral, universal forms that their male creators claimed. Chicago, who changed her name from Judy Gerowitz in 1970 in a deliberate act of feminist self-naming, was in 1969 still working within the formal vocabulary of Minimalism while beginning to introduce the feminist content that would make her one of the most influential artists of the womens movement. The colored pencil medium, with its capacity for precision and chromatic intensity, allows Chicago to create the sharp edges and saturated colors of Hard-Edge painting in a medium that has traditionally been associated with domestic craft rather than with the aggressive industrial materials of Minimalist sculpture. The three star forms, rendered with the geometric precision of a technical drawing, are both abstract compositions and coded representations of female genitalia, a dual reading that Chicago makes explicit in the title.

Chicagos early Minimalist works are foundational documents in the history of feminist art, demonstrating that feminist content could be encoded in the formal vocabulary of abstract art and that the supposedly neutral forms of Minimalism were in fact gendered. 3 Star Cunts influenced the development of feminist abstraction and the broader movement to reclaim female anatomy as a subject for art.

A 1969 colored pencil drawing by Chicago encoding feminist content in three Hard-Edge star forms that double as representations of female anatomy, challenging the masculinist conventions of Minimalist abstraction with the precision of a medium associated with domestic craft.