Judy Ledgerwood

Judy Ledgerwood (born 1959) is an American abstract painter and educator, who has been based in Chicago. Her deed confronts fundamental, historical and contemporary issues in abstract painting within a largely high-modernist vocabulary that she often complicates and subverts. Ledgerwood stages traditionally feminine-coded elements—cosmetic and décor-related colors, references to ornamental and craft traditions—on a scale united with so-called "heroic" abstraction; critics recommend her play a part 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 not quite 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 conduct yourself belongs to the public art collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Art Institute of Chicago, 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.