Judy Ledgerwood

Judy Ledgerwood, Grandma's Flower Garden, acrylic mica, acrylic gouache and oil on canvas, 84" x 120", 2006. Judy Ledgerwood (born 1959) is an American abstract painter and educator, who has been based in Chicago. Ledgerwood stages traditionally feminine-coded elements—cosmetic and décor-related colors, references to ornamental and craft traditions—on a scale associated with so-called "heroic" abstraction; critics suggest her work enacts an upending or "domestication" of modernist male authority that opens the tradition to allusions to female sexuality, design, glamour and pop culture. Critic John Yau writes, "In Ledgerwood’s paintings the viewer encounters elements of humor, instances of surprise, celebrations of female sexuality, forms of vulgar tactility, and intense and unpredictable combinations of color. There is nothing formulaic about her approach."

Ledgerwood has exhibited widely at galleries throughout the United States and in Europe and at institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Smart Museum of Art, and Renaissance Society. Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others; a monograph, Judy Ledgerwood, was published in 2009 by Hatje Cantz. Ledgerwood lives and works in the Chicago area with her husband, artist Tony Tasset, and teaches at Northwestern University.

Life and career Ledgerwood was born in 1959 in the small farming community of Brazil, Indiana and identified as an artist from an early age. Her Midwest upbringing informed the sense of space and light in her early landscape-related work and her later use of craft and decorative forms relates to being from, in her words, a "family of quilters." After graduating, she enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), attracted by that city's balance of affordability, available large studio spaces, and connection to the larger art world. At SAIC, she studied under artists Christina Ramberg and Phil Hanson, among others, earning an MFA in 1984.

Ledgerwood was part of a conceptually oriented group of Chicago artists that embraced theory and a global, rather than regional, view of the art world, distinguishing them from the earlier Chicago Imagists. She began exhibiting professionally in group shows at galleries such as Randolph Street and Feature in 1987–8; solo efforts at Scott Hanson Gallery (New York, 1989) and Robbin Lockett Gallery (Chicago, 1989–92) soon followed. Her early work investigated gender issues encoded in 19th-century landscape painting and mid-20th-century Abstract Expressionism through formal choices informed by being female. Critics identify as central to her work: transgressive use of color as a vehicle for content and critique; imposing scale; attention to spatial relationships between picture plane and edge and surrounding physical space; freely painted, shifting motifs of patterned basic shapes; an emphasis on performative and material aspects of painting; a phenomenological embrace of tenuousness and optical effects regarding the viewing experience. with occasional insertions of small, flat rectangles that blurred distinctions further. others identified in her articulation of differences a subversion of conventional equations of sublime with masculine, and beauty with feminine. Rainlight, 1993) and increasingly delved into the experience of perception. Ledgerwood explored this motif in various color palettes, combining blacks with pinks, purples, magentas and ultramarine (e.g., Tranquilizer, 1997; Basement Love, 1999) in a series exploring sexuality, and yellows on silver and white in another, Op-Art-like series. One of the latter works (the 17' x 35' Groovin' on Lemon, 1995) comprised half of a temporary, site-specific installation commissioned for the new MCA Chicago building, which Ledgerwood described as "a meditation on light and rhythm." The adjacent, same-sized companion, Groovin' on Violet, fully emerged only after a viewer's eyes adjusted, replicating the afterimage formed from viewing the other work. Critics compared the work's myriad shifts between obscurity and clarity to those of the Rothko Chapel and Light and Space installations of Robert Irwin. New York Times critic Ken Johnson described later works in this vein as "paradoxical fusions of actuality and virtuality" painted with "the carefree abandon of an improvising jazz musician." He and others noted Ledgerwood's use of irregular white-bordered edges suggesting drooping, bowed tapestries or quilts pinned to walls (e.g., Grandma's Flower Garden, 2006, above)—a reference to traditionally feminine arts—which combined with her overt decorative forms and de-stabilized grids to upend high-modernist conceits of seriousness. Writers suggest that show's off-kilter diamond-patterned grids, unbalanced color interactions, and perspectival shifts posited a modernism reoriented toward fragility and an ungainly, lifelike mortality. and Art Institute of Chicago (2018). These include a body of smaller, simplified paintings featuring more thickly painted, iconic cruciform arrangements of circles and schematized floral shapes (e.g., Post Punk Female Abstraction, 2010), relief-like polyurethane "blob paintings," and large, painted ceramic vases. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Public Library, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, and Smart Museum of Art, among others. Artadia (2004), and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (1997), the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Illinois Arts Council.