TAKING COVER: An ancient stone Venus inspires a winning work.

Here's the thing about the Venus of Willendorf: Nobody actually knows what she is. Since being dredged from the muck of an Austrian excavation site in 1908, the oolitic limestone figurine has been taken for a religious figure, a good-luck totem, a fertility symbol, an aphrodisiac, a self-portrait and a sex toy. She is perhaps some permutation of all those things. Whatever she was when she was carved circa 30,000 BCE, though, today she is a female tabula rasa, a blank slate of femininity.