Visit even a few venues participating in Los Angeles's citywide Pacific Standard Time initiative, and it's impossible to miss Judy Chicago. The Chicago-born, L.A.-educated artist is featured in no fewer than eight museum exhibitions, two performance events, and three gallery shows, two of them solo. She is, without a doubt, one of the most popular artists of Pacific Standard Time.

But Chicago, who legally changed her name from Gerowitz in 1970 as a feminist statement — announcing the name change via a full-page ad in Artforum — wasn't always so popular. She was largely ignored in the 1960s, despite her best efforts to paint like a man, with slick, minimalist plastic paintings and spray-painted car hoods. By the 1970s, she had founded the first feminist art program at CalArts, and had begun to transform into the unapologetically feminist artist she is today. In conjunction with the kickoff of Pacific Standard Time, ARTINFO spoke with Chicago to discuss what it was like to be a female artist in the '60s, what she thinks of PST, and why her work is more complex than just "The Dinner Party."

You are in a total of 13 exhibitions and events connected to Pacific Standard Time. What do you think this will do for the public's understanding of your work?

One of my abiding gripes is that I'd like my work to be known as more than "The Dinner Party," even though I'm incredibly grateful that it is finally permanently housed [at the Brooklyn Museum]. I just published a book on Frida Kahlo, and it taught me that it's not unusual for women artists to be seen only through a small portion of their work. Frida Kahlo did more than self-portraits, but that's what we know. For a long time, all we knew about Meret Oppenheim was the little, fur-lined teacup. But I'm hoping that because Pacific Standard Time is looking at different aspects, particularly of my early work — my plastics, my fireworks, my performance — the view of my work will be broadened.

Some curators involved with PST are saying that one of the reasons that women artists of the postwar era haven't been institutionalized is because they often worked in ephemeral media, such as performance. You are possibly an exception to that rule, but what do you make of that idea?

I have two responses to it. One, it's something that I discussed quite alot with my former student Suzanne Lacy, who has only recently begun tobe distressed by the fact that her work is being erased because of its performative aspect. I think she's trying to figure out how to counter that, because of course Marina Abramovic had a huge retrospective at theMuseum of Modern Art. And, of course, Abramovic's work is definitely being collected. So I don't actually think that's a valid argument. I think it was a valid argument earlier, but that has changed.Museums are starting to collect time-based and performance work. So, I guess they have to rethink why they aren't in institutions.

So why else might that be?

I don't know the answer. But I'm not in the major museums either. There's no work of mine in the Museum of Modern Art, or the Whitney, or the Metropolitan. I've never been in a Whitney Biennial. That pattern isnot restricted to just performance artists. And in fact, it continues to be the case that in the major institutions like the MoMA or the Pompidou or Tate Modern, the percentage of women in the permanent collections continues to be between 3 and 5 percent.

Does Pacific Standard Time have the potential to have a ripple effect outside Los Angeles in that respect?

I think we'll have to wait and see. I know that a couple of the male California artists who are now in the collection of the Museum of ModernArt, De Wain Valentine and a couple of the others were added recently.

As part of PST's performance festival in January, Dawn Kasper will stage a digital reinterpretation of Womanhouse, the month-long performance led by you and Miriam Shapiro in 1972 during which you inhabited an abandoned Hollywood mansion with several other women. What do you think of the notion of restaging Womanhouse online in women-only chatrooms?

There's actually been quite a number of online works done in response to Womanhouse. Karen Keifer Boyd, a professor at Penn State, has done an online version of Womanhouse, as well as Amelia Jones. I think it's great that Womanhouse is still alive, but I also think it demonstrates that even though feminist theorists love to say that gender is a changing construct, for a lot of women it's not. I think that's why women, particularly young women, go back to the themes of Womanhouse.

Do you think there is a particular show in Pacific Standard Time that best exemplifies your work from the postwar era?

Altogether, Pacific Standard Time will provide 13 different situations to see different aspects of my work in the first two decades of my career, prior to 1960 until when "The Dinner Party" premiered in 1979. The tandem solo shows that I'm having at the Jancar Gallery in Chinatown, which will show some of my modest size work, and Nye + Brown in Culver City, which will show my monumental paintings and sculpture, will provide a more in-depth look at my early work. I have a large body of work after "The Dinner Party," but this will give people an understanding of what I did prior to it and how it grew out of my earlier work. Even in terms of the PST shows, the combination of my work at the Getty — a large plastic piece and one of my car hoods — and at MOCA, which has a suite of drawings called the "Rejection Quintet," shows how my imagery was changing from that early minimal work.

The Los Angeles Times published a list of the "most popular" 20 artists in PST — in other words, those who are in the most museum exhibitions. Five women — you, Vija Celmins, Betye Saar, Suzanne  Lacy and Barbara T. Smith — are on the list. Do you think there is any women artist who is missing, or someone who should be better represented?

I think they've made a great effort to include women and artists of color in Pacific Standard Time. You have to remember when I was coming up as a young woman here, there were no women in shows. So in relationship to that there is definite progress. And it's not that women artists weren't working, it's that they weren't visible in the 1960s and '70s. In a recent interview in the L.A. Weekly, I acknowledged Billy Al Bengston as my mentor. And on the next page, Billy Al is interviewed and he says, "You have to have balls to make art." Now, he's unrepentant in his attitudes, even now. So imagine that attitude if you were a young woman artist. How would that make you feel? That's what it was like in the 1960s here. I felt exceedingly isolated. Even though I went to school with Vija [Celmins], she and I didn't know each other at all. And it's interesting, because she was not as visible in the '60s as she became later. Another artist, Helen Pashgian, was completely ignored in the '60s. I think its great that Helen is beginning to be recognized — my god, she's worked for a very long time. But it's one thing to look back on this period. It was quite another to live it.

Many Pacific Standard Time shows, like the ones at the Hammer Museum, the Fowler Museum, and the Otis College of Art and Design, consider previously ignored artistic communities in isolation. There is an exhibition devoted to black artists, chicano artists, women artists, etc. Isn't it possible to view those exhibitions as ghettoizing those artistic groups?

In the '70s in California, that's what was happening. There were a number of groups who felt completely marginalized: African-Americans, Hispanics, women. All those kinds of artists were working but they were completely excluded. And so they got together to begin to try and make change. And all those histories are completely unknown. So the problem is, let's say the Getty brought in all those unknown black, feminist, and Hispanic artists — you would have no context to understand them in, because they don't fit in the mainstream context. That was the whole point: they didn't fit into it. I didn't fit into it. You saw what I had to do. I had to make art in the '60s as if I was not a woman. There could be no hint of my gender in that work. It wasn't until the '70s that I said, "I'm fed up with this, I'm going to be myself." That was happening in a lot of groups, so the context has to be established and integrated into the mainstream, and we're a long way from that. Right now, there's just the Finish Fetish school. And everybody else doesn't fit in there. How do you redefine that? This is the first step.

[Correction: An earlier edition of this article mentioned only three of the five women — Judy Chicago, Vija Celmins, and Betye Saar — listed on the Los Angeles Times's list of the most popular artists in Pacific Standard Time. The article has been updated to reflect the omissions.]