In the tradition of Modernist painting, Judy Ledgerwood paints monumental abstract compositions that explore light, color, and structure. Her paintings are formal, decorative, and tranquil while simultaneously being highly personal, optically challenging, and inherently subversive. In her compositions, she creates a dialogue that is uniquely feminine but also powerful and authoritative. Early in her career, Ledgerwood began incorporating traditionally feminine pastel colors into her landscape based paintings in an attempt to challenge and undermine the historically male-dominated tradition of gestural abstract paintings. Today her compositions include circular motifs typically associated with the decorative arts tradition. In the 1970s many feminist artists identified and celebrated circular patterns as being connected to female identity. Ledgerwood acknowledges this tradition through her continued use of dot motifs, which she identifies as her form of non exclamatory mark-making. Ledgerwood is the recipient of a Tiffany Award in the Visual Arts, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, an Illinois Art Council Award and two CIRA Grants from Northwestern University. Her work is represented in the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Swissbank New York. Her degrees are from the Art Academy of Cincinnati, BFA, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MFA.
http://www.hydeparkart.org/alist/profile/ledgerwood_judy
