Judy Ledgerwood | Hyperallergic
Judy Ledgerwood, "First Color" (2022), oil on canvas, 15 inches x 15 inches (all images courtesy Denny Gallery)
By John Yau
A lot of writers, myself included, have connected Judy Ledgerwood’s exuberant abstractions to the Pattern and Decoration art movement. Historically speaking, Pattern and Decoration (1972–1985) challenged the canon-making orthodoxies and conventions that dominated much art in the 1960s and ’70s, and that continue to cast their shadow. This challenge to the canon, which manifests itself as celebrations of the female body and sexuality in Ledgerwood’s work, is inseparable from her vocabulary of hand-painted quatrefoils, interlocking triangles, and thickly painted labial shapes. What distinguishes Ledgerwood’s work from the earlier generation of women artists working in the domain of Pattern and Decoration is its bluntness and humor.