Jo Applin

Judy Chicago photographed in 1970 by Jerry McMillan. Courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, California.

In​ 1970, the artist formerly known as Judy Gerowitz renounced ‘all names imposed on her through male social dominance’ and became Judy Chicago, doing away with both her paternal and marital surnames. She pinned the announcement to the wall of her exhibition of...

‘Feminist art history is there to make trouble,’ Linda Nochlin once wrote. The hagiographic preservation of a debate about ‘greatness’ now fifty years old seems an odd way of doing justice to those troublemaking tendencies. Perhaps the real question is whether we still need to hold onto Nochlin’s question at all.