In the summer of 1964, Lynda Benglis, described "as a very canny young woman from Louisiana, Tulane BFA in hand", made her way to New York on a bus filled with anti-Jim Crow activists on their way home from Mississippi.

She lost her Southern accent as fast as she could and enrolled at the Brooklyn Museum Art School; within a few months, it seems, she knew almost everyone in the art world. Her blunt manner must have been balanced by considerable charm if, as the story goes, she really got away with telling David Hockney, at one of his openings, that his drawings were good but that he ought to forget about his paintings. She also recommended to Dan Flavin, still making painted boxes with light-bulbs sticking out, that maybe...