Having only known her as the cool, confrontational artist in photos, I suspected Lucas, 55, would be tough in person. But when I meet her at the New Museum where she’s currently installing over 150 works for her first ever U.S. retrospective open September 26, Au Naturel, she is cool as a cucumber, albeit frazzled by the installation (she’s currently figuring out the best placement for a set of gigantic concrete boots in the museum’s lobby.) Just last week, she invited a group of women (and men in drag or dressed as giant phalluses) to the New Museum to help her create One Thousand Eggs: For Women, in which women throw precisely 1,000 eggs at a wall to create a gooey, yellow painting. “Women, we’ve got eggs, but they’re limited,” she tells me over lunch. “It’s a different thing to be a bloke… your seed isn’t limited. You can produce more and more of it, you can spill any amount of it around, if you’re just having a wank, and it doesn’t cut off.”