In the 1970s, Judy Chicago created icons of women’s empowerment in the form of stylized flowers and butterflies. These images of the feminine lifeforce are among the artist’s most celebrated. A historically important work, “Submerge/Emerge” (1976/2005), marks a transition between two series for which Chicago is best known. Drawing on the pulsing abstract sunbursts of her “Great Ladies” paintings, beating butterfly wings radiate out from a nucleus, a central core, or an erogenous vortex, foreshadowing the artist’s masterpiece “The Dinner Party.” Butterflies are symbols of metamorphosis, flight, and freedom. Indeed, Chicago claimed the butterfly as emblematic of feminine beauty and orgasmic joy.
“Submerge/Emerge” is a hand-painted relief made from cast paper with detailed linework at the center, demonstrating how Chicago refined her imagery across different formats. A high-concept, high-design artist, Chicago passionately perfected her skills in diverse modes of painting. In the 1960s, she went to autobody school to learn how to spray-paint in a class of six hundred men. Before making “The Dinner Party,” she trained in glaze painting at the kitchen tables of a handful of women. “Submerge/Emerge” features the stylistic signature of Chicago's ombre spray paint
