One artist who embraced this change was Judy Cohen, who was born to activist Jewish parents in Chicago in 1939. Her youthful desire to become an artist could only be described as a drive. As an undergraduate at UCLA, she was a classmate of Vija Celmins, and even her teachers were daunted by her apparent ambition. An irrepressible personality, round-figured with mounds of springy brown hair, Cohen was still in the UCLA art department when she married aspiring songwriter Jerry Gerowitz in 1961. The couple moved to a house in Topanga Canyon where, just two years later, driving the treacherous curving road there, his car went over a steep embankment and he was killed. Devastated, she allowed herself a period of mourning before returning to her studies at UCLA with greater resolve. She rented an apartment in a building in Santa Monica owned and designed by architect Frank Gehry, whose brother-in-law Rolf Nelson would show her work in his new gallery at 669 North La Cienega Boulevard. The first paintings completed after her husband’s death were biomorphic abstractions based on her own anatomy that disturbed her mostly male professors.
