Birth Hood is one of a set of four spray-painted Chevrolet Corvair car hoods that Judy Chicago created in 1964. Preceding her minimalist work, they contain the seeds of all the formal, conceptual and iconographic strategies that have informed Chicago’s feminist methodology to this day: the embrace of what she calls ‘fringe’ techniques and subjects unacceptable to the reigning art historical canon (here combining spray painting with biomorphic imagery laced with sexual innuendo), the material fusion of figure and ground and her distinctive rainbow palette. In order to make them, Chicago apprenticed at an autobody workshop as the only woman among 250 men, one of many ‘firsts’ that would come to define her career as the pioneering artist who paved the way for feminist art and arts education.