Judy Chicago

American artist

• Born: July 20, 1939
• Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois

Chicago was an early participant and prime mover in the feminist art movement. She contributed to art education theory with her teaching, and her 1979 installation The Dinner Party has become an icon of feminist art, and a piece that continues to inspire controversy both inside and outside the art world.

Early Life

Judy Chicago was born Judith Cohen to Jewish parents, Arthur Cohen and May Cohen, who, politically, were left-leaning. As a child, Chicago attended art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1957, she started classes at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), graduated with a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1962, and earned a master of fine arts (MFA) in painting and sculpture in 1964. In 1961, she married Jerry Gerowitz; he died in a car crash two years later. She married sculptor Lloyd Hamrol in 1969, but they later divorced. In 1985, she married photographer David Woodman.

In Chicago's first autobiography, she recounts the sexism and prejudice she faced from other artists. She received some critical recognition between 1964 and 1970, largely for her minimalist sculptural work and her collaborative performance pieces.

Already in the early 1960s, her paintings showed latent sexual (and female) content (Mother Superette, 1964), though this was disguised beneath the mainstream current of abstraction. When she received comments that she was doing woman’s painting (criticism she perceived as negative), she retreated into sculpture and emphasized its abstract formalism. Her work from this period exemplifies the “cool” minimalism of the “fetish finish” school of California art, which celebrated shiny, smooth surfaces and finishes. However, from 1968 on, she was influenced by her readings in feminism, and she attempted to develop a formal language to express her experiences as a woman (Pasadena Lifesavers , 1968–70).

In 1970, Judy Cohen Gerowitz legally changed her name to Judy Chicago, honoring her hometown and, as she proclaimed, divesting herself “of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance.” The name change was a clear feminist act (and publicity for an upcoming show).

Life’s Work

After receiving her MFA, Chicago did some part-time teaching in the Los Angeles area; and in 1970, she was hired by Fresno State College (now Fresno State University) to teach art there full time. In Fresno, Chicago launched an experiment in feminist art education, which she continued in the following years at the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) in Valencia in collaboration with Miriam Schapiro. Female students received an intensive studio experience of consciousness raising, reading and research on women’s issues and art history, and training in tool use and artistic expression. The program was separatist in philosophy, with women students and women teachers working alone together at an off-campus site. The program deliberately challenged mainstream values of modernism by stressing content over form, and by erasing the hierarchical boundaries between crafts and fine arts. Its aim was to transform female students into professional artists. The culmination of the program at Cal Arts was Womanhouse (1972), for which students and teachers worked both individually and collaboratively to transform, often in surrealist ways, a domestic space (a donated and near-derelict house) as a means for exploring women’s roles and experiences.

The Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts was a Camelot of the early feminist movement on the West Coast. By 1973, dissension among the women, and negative pressures from the institutional structure disillusioned Chicago. She resigned in 1973. However, because of the interactions offered by the Feminist Art Program, the 1970s were highly productive for her. She developed a formal vocabulary that she felt expressed female experience and feminine sensibility: Central core imagery of circle, vulva, and butterfly. She created several major projects in the years 1972–74: the Great Ladies series, Through the Flower, and The Rejection Quintet. In 1974, she began what would become her masterpiece, The Dinner Party, which focuses on women’s contributions to history. The Dinner Party premiered at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979.

As exhibited, The Dinner Party was a monumental installation of thirty-nine place settings arranged along the three sides of an equilateral triangle. Each place setting represented a great woman from myth or history, and consisted of a carefully designed painted porcelain plate and a carefully realized needlework runner. The plates all contained Chicago’s signature central core imagery; the runners, worked in techniques historically appropriate to the woman represented, often added a narrative. The table, which measured forty-eight feet to a side, stood on a ceramic tile floor on which were inscribed the names of 999 other undervalued women in history.

The piece was entirely transgressive. Its monumentality was exceptional for a woman artist. While all the designs were Chicago's, its manufacture depended on the collective work of almost four hundred volunteers; thus it undercut modernism’s insistence on single creative authorship. Also anti-modernist was its insistence on combining craft and fine arts traditions and, of course, its polemical content. The use of Chicago’s suggestive core imagery on such a scale was seen as inflammatory. Criticism of the work was intense and highly polarized. For some it was a sacral experience celebrating women, while for others it was vulgar pornography.

Criticism swirled around the work: Chicago came under fire even among some feminists, who labeled her an essentialist, one who believes that gender is biological rather than culturally constructed. Not all this criticism was justified, as later interviews with Chicago suggested. After its early exhibitions, the piece was rarely shown until it was made the centerpiece for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 2007.

Chicago continued to work on both individual pieces and large collaborative works in the last decades of the twentieth century. These included The Birth Project (1984, painting, drawing, and needlework) and The Holocaust Project (1985–93, in collaboration with her husband David Woodman). In addition to works of visual art, Chicago has written extensively in documentation of her life and work. She published two autobiographies, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (1975) and Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist (1996). She also documented the production of The Dinner Party with two volumes, The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage (1979), and Embroidering Our Heritage: The Dinner Party Needlework (1980).

In 2013, Chicago's work saw numerous exhibitions around the globe in light of her seventy-fifth birthday. Pennsylvania State University (in 2011, Chicago donated her collection of archival materials on feminist art education to the school) hosted a semester-long series of classes, programs, exhibitions, and lectures called Surveying Judy Chicago: Five Decades. Galleries and museums in New York and Mexico also hosted Chicago retrospectives throughout 2014. In March 2014, Chicago added another book to her catalog of written work—Institutional Time: A Critique of Studio Art Education.

In the 2010s and 2020s, Chicago's work was the subject of several major retrospectives. These included 2018 exhibitions at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington, DC, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, Florida; a 2019 exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, California; Judy Chicago: Herstory, a 2023 exhibition at the New Museum in New York City, which then traveled to LUMA Arles, in France, in 2024 ; and 2024's Judy Chicago: Revelations at the Serpentine North Gallery, in London, UK. Chicago also collaborated with Serpentine on an illustrated manuscript also titled Judy Chicago: Revelations, which the publisher, Thames & Hudson, described as "the work that Judy Chicago believed would never be published: a radical retelling of human history in the form of an illuminated manuscript, recovering stories of women that society sought to erase." Chicago started the manuscript in the mid-1970s,as she worked on her installation The Dinner Party.

Significance

Chicago’s The Dinner Party has become an icon of twentieth century feminist art. As such, it is often treated in isolation from the historical, visual, and political contexts of its production. The history of the critique the work received in 1979, and the mutations that criticism has undergone in the decades since, are informative of the feminist movement and the modernist and postmodernist backlash to feminism.

One measure of an artist’s significance is the success of the students that artist has trained. Among Chicago’s former art students are Faith Wilding, Suzanne Lacy, Nancy Youdelman, and Vanalyne Green, participants in the Feminist Art Project who have gone on to full and notable careers.

While the extensive self-documentation Chicago has published may appear to be self-promotion, its intent is rather to prevent the erasure of her work from history, an erasure she feels has wiped out the work of so many women before her.

Bibliography

Broude, Norma, and Mary D. Garrard, eds. The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970’s History and Impact. New York: Abrams, 1994. Print. Broude and Garrard, respected feminist art historians, study the developments of the 1970s to establish their context and impact. Many of the contributors (though not the editors) participated in the Fresno and Cal Arts programs. Copious illustrations.

Gehrhard, Jane. The Dinner Party: Judy Chicago and the Power of Popular Feminism, 1970–2007. Athens: U of Georgia P. Print.

Gerhard, Jane. "Judy Chicago and the Practice of 1970s Feminism." Feminist Studies 37.3 (2011): 591–618. Print.

Jones, Amelia, ed. Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History. Berkeley: U California P, 1996. Print. An exhibition catalog for a show of the same name organized by UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center in Los Angeles. It is an important attempt to place works of feminist art, especially the work of Chicago, in their historical and art historical contexts. Critical to an understanding of her work is the essay by Laura Meyer, placing her within the style developments of Southern California, and the analysis by Jones of the criticism of Chicago’s work. Many photographs of feminist works.

"Judy Chicago: Herstory." LUMA Arles, 30 June 2024, www.luma.org/fr/arles/notre-programme/event/herstory-judy-chicago-9304f364-b273-47f2-bf6e-46b40f8158ce.html. Accessed 5 June 2024.

"Judy Chicago: Revelations--Artist Biography." Serpentine, 2024, www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/judy-chicago-revelations/. Accessed 5 June 2024.

Levin, Gail. Becoming Judy Chicago: A Biography of the Artist. New York: Harmony, 2007. Print. Detailed and perhaps overly personal biography based on Chicago’s own writing and the letters preserved in her archives at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe, Harvard University. Extensive bibliography and end notes.

Levy, Ariel. "Party Girl." New Yorker 9 Aug. 2010: 25. Print.

Lucie-Smith, Edward. Judy Chicago: An American Vision. New York: Watson, 2000. Print. A monograph of the artist’s work.

Reckitt, Helena, ed. Art and Feminism. New York: Phaidon, 2001. Print. An attempt to present the range of feminist art from the last third of the twentieth century, supported by key texts and documents of their time.

Sackler, Elizabeth A., ed. Judy Chicago. New York: Watson, 2002. Print. Publication to accompany the retrospective of Chicago’s work at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. It includes an interview with art critic Lucy Lippard and an attempt to contextualize quotations from Chicago from the perspective of the end of the century.