Study for the sculpture at Walker Art Center I

In 1954, Chryssa relocated to San Francisco for a brief period, where she studied at the California School of Fine Arts, eventually making her way to New York City. There she became fascinated by symbols and was attracted to everything related to communication, language and writing: from simple letters in newspapers to names on building entrances, to metal signs outdoors and later to neon billboards. In the early 1960s, she began her compositions using letters, isolating individual words from a group of words and then single letters or groups of letters, transforming them into thematic plastic shapes. She exclusively used letters from the Latin alphabet. Around 1966-1967, she began preparing for her solo exhibition at the Walker Art Centre and created studies for sculptures that would be presented there. In these studies, she produced variations of the same motif, an "analysis" of half of the letter "Y," and experimented with neon tubes in different colours. She often used bold colours, aiming to achieve balance and harmony among them while regulating the intensity of their brightness using various types of neon tubes. The colouring process for these tubes was handmade, involving some of the best artisans in America.