In the mid-1960s Niki de Saint Phalle began creating her most well-known and celebrated series of works, the Nanas, which were meditations on both the exalted and disparaged position women held in society (“nanas” in French is a slang term meaning “broads”). She was inspired to make these works after a visit with Clarice Rivers, the wife of the artist Larry Rivers who was a close friend and also pregnant at the time. Saint Phalle’s Nanas are expressive, exuberant, archetypal,

 cartoonish, engaging, fertile and imaginative. In the 1970s she began working on a more monumental scale, creating public sculptures, sculptural environments and buildings. In 1979, the foundations were laid for the Tarot Garden in Tuscany, which featured twenty-two sculptures over 14 acres and was completed in 1998. In 1982 she finished The Empress, an imposing sculptural building that she lived and worked in for the next ten years. Throughout the 1980s she returned to her Nanas and also began making kinetic sculptures in the 1990s as homage to Tinguely after his death in 1991.

Saint Phalle’s work combined mediums in new ways, blending and dismantling hierarchies between painting, sculpture, and performance. She also brought exuberance for the female body and spirit to the forefront of her work, when many of her contemporaries were working in a stark, modernist, masculine style.