Just as any artist infuses their personal experiences and vision into their work, Joan Lyons realized that her work could not be separated from her unique experiences as a woman and artist. Men have long dominated the field of contemporary art as the best-known painters, sculptors, and even photographers. So, over the past six decades, Lyons has employed a variety of difficult and obscure image-making processes, and by often using herself as the model, Lyons aimed to contradict, “everything that I had been taught art should be—namely abstract, universal, non-representational, and male.”