In the past weeks, we have been looking at some wonderful, all male artists in the Bay Area and London (Joan Brown the notable exception).

This week there are two, very different, simultaneous shows opening in San Francisco that are light years from those groups.

Two Chicago-born women artists, Judy Chicago and Joan Mitchell, are taking over the De Young and SF MoMA. It's a moment worth celebrating. Though their trajectories and practices are wholly different, it's a reminder that other breakthroughs were going on as the figuratives in London and the Bay Area had returned to the human body for inspiration.

Chicago (nee Cohen) is one of the leading figures of American feminist art. Through painting, textiles, installations (notably The Dinner Party, likely her most well-known work)and perhaps most importantly pedagogy, Chicago galvanized art practice in the women's movement both by her teaching at Cal Arts and Fresno and by the founding of Womanhouse and its successor, the Women's Building in LA. (This aspect of her practice was front and center in the stimulating exhibition Wack, Art and the Feminist Revolution at MoCA in 2007.) Chicago aimed to demonstrate how women artists had been routinely marginalized. She conjoined her own personal practice with education--a true sisterhood. For some observers, this is still a tough pill to swallow.

Though Chicago began in minimalism which was in ascendance in LA at the time, she broke away from this movement and began working with acrylics and sprayed and painted forms that explored a visual language that could impart her feelings about women's sexuality.

In 1972, Chicago began a series Women and Smoke, early performative works in the California desert. Immolation, pictured here, is symbolic for me of the explosion of radical thinking about women and art that Chicago incited and encouraged. Image two is one of her beautiful plates dedicated to Virginia Woolf, 1975-8 from The Dinner Party which memorialized the contributions of women who had made similar important strides.