Niki de Saint Phalle lived in a medieval Templar castle that was supposed to hold hidden treasure stashes and crypts.

She never found the gold, but she did discover a couple of secret passageways. Keith Haring reported that in addition to the plague-like vibes there were also a flock sheep running around in front of the house. The house was not always safe and kind of creepy, but it was also a gathering place and home.

Niki’s Nana House II is also a little bit creepy. I mean, an anus is not my usual idea of a welcoming front door. And in some ways that ew factor is accurate, Niki’s homes were the site of trauma from an abusive father during her pre-teens to nervous breakdowns a decade later because of her own screaming children.

But this Nana isn’t sneaking around being sketchy, she’s got her chin, boobies, and belly held high. And her black skin isn’t an arbitrary aesthetic choice, Niki believed that fixing our problems is as simple as taking power from the people who have it and giving it to the people who don’t. She said in an interview, “Black power and women power, we get together, take over everything. It’s the solution. A new world of joy.”

Those weren’t hollow words either, she made name for herself in art by shooting the heads of famous men with a shotgun, forming her own passages right through their plaster skulls. Deposing the heads of state in her own backyard. Not that she had delusions of becoming the next Ché, she knew that her way to change society was by “proposing visions of these happy, joyous, domineering women.”

She may have been, actually, a little successful in inciting change with her work Journalists have questioned whether one of her other sculptures, Hon (1966), which she called “the biggest whore in the world” was responsible for a rise in the local birth rate that year. More people isn’t usually my idea of a solution to anything but, if those Swedish babies were conceived in the spirit of Niki’s vision for an empowered-femme future, maybe they’ve done good for the world.