ABSTRACT
As the Women's Liberation Movement advanced in the late 1960s, June Blum's burgeoning feminist viewpoint led her to stage a series of 'time-space-light environment events', which were descended from Happenings but closely tied to the artist's interests in painting and sculpture. After creating time-space-light environment events for several years, Blum resumed painting on canvas, but was disinclined to revisit the black- and-white abstractions that dominated her work between 1963 and 1968. In 1975, Blum executed two paintings of prominent women at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, which was then housed in the rotunda of the Bronx County Courthouse. June Blum's portrayals of strong women culminated in Betty Friedan as the Prophet, a portrait of the feminist matriarch whose groundbreaking book, The Feminine Mystique (1963), invigorated the burgeoning Women's Liberation Movement. As an extension of the paintings, June Blum conceived four nonlinear and non-chronological 'conceptual documentations', created between April and December 1976.
