When artist Mia Westerlund Roosen debuted her conical sculptures, which unmistakably recall phalluses, at the “25th Anniversary Exhibition of Leo Castelli” in 1982, she did so as a form of feminist protest. The exhibition, celebrating one of the postwar era’s most important galleries, had assembled together a pantheon of postwar American artists, the majority of them men. Westerlund Roosen was one of four women featured in the 29-artist exhibition.

Inclusion, however, didn’t translate into sustained recognition and attention. Rather than provoking debate, Westerlund Roosen’s work was quietly sidelined. “They just sort of ignored me,” she recently told ARTnews, recalling her sculptures being dismissed as “reductive” or “eccentric.” What was read as deviation was, in fact, a form of refusal, a refusal to remove the body from sculpture at a moment when the dominant sculptural language prized hard edges, industrial finish, and emotional distance.