In 1866, Gustave Courbet painted a picture of a nude woman with her legs apart, entitled "The Origin of the World". In October 2013, artist Peter Reynosa painted the pop singer Madonna "in the shape of a defiant yonic symbol", titling the red and white acrylic work "I Am the Cunt of Western Civilization", a 1990 quote from the singer.In 2021, Priya Khanchandani, a curator at London's Design Museum, imagined the plethora of vulva art projects as a "re-balancing" with the past century of phallic symbolism in architecture. She sees a “resurgence of interest” in female designers, artists and architects, and “the idea of the vagina as a design trope is symbolic of that”