The Imagists took their cues from Surrealism, Pop, and West Coast underground comic illustration, and their works often included themes of female sexuality.
[1] Ramberg depicted partial female bodies (heads, torsos, hands) often in submissive poses in undergarments, imagined in odd, seemingly erotic predicaments.
In the United States, the family lived in Kansas, Virginia, and Highwood, Illinois where Christina attended Highland Park High School for her junior and senior year.
Ramberg relates a memory of watching her mother dress for a party in an interview: "She would wear these—I guess that they are called 'Merry Widow[s]'—and I can remember being stunned by how it transformed her body, how it pushed up her breasts and slenderized down her waist.
Critic Katheryn Rosenfeld, in a 2000 New Art Examiner review stated: "it's... hard not to read in the work a psycho-sexual inventory of the limitations of white middle-class womanhood at mid-century.
In a 2012 Art in America review, Nancy Princenthal described the draftsmanship in Ramberg's 1970 Corset/Urn series as "inky black with spiky pink highlights, they are prim and sexily sinister... deft, dark and reticent.
[4] Her human forms turned from figures seen from the back or in profile to fully frontal torsos that are more rigid and robotic, and have both male and female characteristics.