Leaves, A Self Portrait, 1973

In the early 1970s, Youdelman was a student in CalArt’s Feminist Art Program, one of the highlights of the school’s early years. This groundbreaking experiment, first piloted by Judy Chicago in 1970 at California State University, Fresno, and then continued by Chicago and Miriam Schapiro at CalArts, was conceived as a radical critique of traditional art-school pedagogy and a calculated effort to mandate change from within an institutional framework. Students were encouraged to work both individually and collectively to make art drawn from their own experiences of womanhood, a relatively daring position at a time when, despite decades of activist efforts toward improving equal rights, American women could still be legally fired for being pregnant and could not obtain lines of credit without a man to cosign. Leaves, A Self Portrait, is an exemplar of the probing, sensitive work to come out of this period; depicting the artist’s body as it gradually disappears under a blanket of fallen leaves, the series strikes a lyrical balance between erasure or insignificance on the one hand, and a sensual connection to the earth on the other.