Hoc women artists' committee was established in New York, Judy Chicago led women-only studio classes at Fresno state University and with Miriam Schapiro instigated the Feminist Art program at the California institute of arts. Binding together for the first time in modern history women gathered politically to protest their excursion from male-dominated exhibitions. The movement known as Pattern and Decoration held its first exhibition "Ten Approaches to the Decorative" at a SoHo gallery in 1976. The new tendency, which attracted both men and women, formalized the use of fabric and surface elaboration as an assault on the rhetoric of Geometric Abstraction and the gender-based, and often pejorative, use of the term "decorative" (Reckitt). In California in the early 1970s, Schapiro and Joyce Kozloff had turned to decorative imagery as a
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