Throughout my career, I have tried to fuse a love for widespread artistic traditions with an activist temperament. Beginning in 1970, energized by my participation in the feminist art movement in Los Angeles and New York, I became a founding member of the Heresies publishing collective and an originating figure of the Pattern and Decoration movement. My colleagues and I were exploring the applied and decorative arts, especially visual cultures of the nonwestern world, as source and inspiration. We wanted to break down the high art/low art hierarchies inherent in the West. As a result of these early discussions and excursions, my patterned paintings eventually moved right off the canvas, evolving into installations composed of hand painted, glazed ceramic tiles and pieced silk wall hangings.