Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago is an American feminist artist, art educator, and writer known for her large collaborative art installation pieces about birth and creation images, which examine the role of women in history and culture. During the 1970s, Chicago founded the first feminist art program in the United States at California State University, Fresno, which acted as a catalyst for feminist art and art education during the 1970s. Her inclusion in hundreds of publications in various areas of the world showcases her influence in the worldwide art community. Many of her books have also been published in other countries, making her work more accessible to international readers. Chicago's work incorporates a variety of artistic skills, such as needlework, counterbalanced with skills such as welding and pyrotechnics. Her most well-known work is The Dinner Party, which is permanently installed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The Dinner Party celebrates the accomplishments of women throughout history and is widely regarded as the first epic feminist artwork. Other notable art projects by Chicago include International Honor Quilt, Birth Project, Powerplay, and The Holocaust Project. She is represented by Jessica Silverman gallery.
Chicago was included in Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People of 2018".
Early life and family
Judy Chicago was born Judith Sylvia Cohen to Arthur and May Cohen in Chicago, Illinois, in 1939. Her father came from a 23-generation-long lineage of rabbis, including the Lithuanian Jewish Vilna Gaon. Breaking family tradition, Arthur became a labor organizer and Marxist. He worked nights at a post office and took care of Chicago during the day, while May, a former dancer, worked as a medical secretary. Arthur's active participation in the American Communist Party, liberal views of women, and support of workers' rights strongly influenced Chicago's own values and thought. During the American McCarthy era, Arthur was investigated, which made it difficult for him to find work and caused the family much turmoil. In 1945, while Chicago was alone at home with her infant brother Ben, an FBI agent visited their house. The agent began to ask the six-year-old Chicago questions about her father and his friends, but the agent was interrupted by May's return to the house. Arthur's health declined, and he died in 1953 from peritonitis. May would not discuss his death with her children and did not allow them to attend the funeral. Chicago did not come to terms with his death until she was an adult; in the early 1960s, she was hospitalized for almost a month with a bleeding ulcer.May loved the arts and instilled her passion for them in her children. Aged three, Chicago began to draw and was sent to the Art Institute of Chicago to attend classes. By the age of five, Chicago knew that she "never wanted to do anything but make art" and continued attending extension classes at the Art Institute throughout her childhood and teens. After high school, she applied to an academic degree program at the School of the Art Institute but was denied admission, and instead attended UCLA on a scholarship.
Education and early career
While at UCLA, she became politically active, designing posters for the UCLA NAACP chapter and eventually became its corresponding secretary. In June 1959, she met and dated Jerry Gerowitz. She left school and moved in with him, for the first time having her own studio space. The couple hitchhiked to New York in 1959, just as Chicago's mother and brother moved to Los Angeles to be closer to her. The couple lived in Greenwich Village for a time before returning in 1960 from Los Angeles to Chicago so she could finish her degree. Chicago married Gerowitz in 1961. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1962 and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa society. Gerowitz died in a car crash in 1963, devastating Chicago and causing her to suffer an identity crisis for several years. She received her Master of Fine Arts from UCLA in 1964.In graduate school, Chicago created a series that was abstract, yet easily recognized as male and female sexual organs. These early works were called Bigamy, and represented the death of her husband. One depicted an abstract penis, which was "stopped in flight" before it could unite with a vaginal form. Her professors, who were mainly men, were dismayed over these works. Despite the use of sexual organs in her work, Chicago refrained from using gender politics or identity as themes.
In 1965, Chicago displayed artwork at her first solo show, at the Rolf Nelson Gallery in Los Angeles. Chicago was one of only four female artists to take part in the show.
In 1968, Chicago was asked why she did not participate in the California Women in the Arts exhibition at the Lytton Center, to which she answered: "I won't show in any group defined as Woman, Jewish, or California. Someday, when we all grow up, there will be no labels." Chicago began working in ice sculpture, which represented "a metaphor for the preciousness of life," another reference towards her husband's death.
In 1969, the Pasadena Art Museum exhibited a series of Chicago's spherical acrylic plastic dome sculptures and drawings in an "experimental" gallery. Art in America declared that Chicago's work was at the forefront of the conceptual art movement, and the Los Angeles Times described the work as showing no signs of "theoretical New York type art." Chicago would describe her early artwork as minimalist and as her trying to be "one of the boys." Chicago would also experiment with performance art, using fireworks and pyrotechnics to create "atmospheres," which involved flashes of colored smoke being manipulated outdoors.
During this time, Chicago also began exploring her own sexuality in her work. She created the Pasadena Lifesavers, which was a series of abstract paintings that placed acrylic paint on Plexiglas. The works blended colors to create an illusion that the shapes "turn, dissolve, open, close, vibrate, gesture, wiggle," representing her own discovery that "I was multi-orgasmic." Chicago credited "Pasadena Lifesavers", as being the major turning point in her work in relation to women's sexuality and representation.
In an interview with Art & Object magazine, Chicago reflected on her early career: “My first decade and a half of practice in Southern California, it was incredibly difficult and challenging cause the art world was so inhospitable to women. Still, within that period I built the building blocks of my career, my formal ability, my color systems, the scale I was interested in working, the level of ambition, the level at which I wanted to try and make a contribution. I had a burning desire to make art. I had a lot to say. And I made making art my reward.”
Name change
As Chicago made her name as an artist and came to know herself as a woman, she no longer felt connected to the surname Cohen. This was due to her grief from the death of her father and the lost connection to her married name Gerowitz, after her husband's death. She decided to change her last name to something independent of being connected to a man by marriage or heritage.In 1965, she married sculptor Lloyd Hamrol. They divorced in 1979.
Gallery owner Rolf Nelson nicknamed her "Judy Chicago" because of her strong personality and strong Chicago accent. She decided this would be her new name. By legally changing her surname from the ethnically charged Gerowitz to the more neutral Chicago, she freed herself from a certain social identity. Chicago was appalled that her new husband's signature approval was required to change her name legally. To celebrate the name change, she posed for the exhibition invitation dressed as a boxer, wearing a sweatshirt with her new last name on it. She also posted a banner across the gallery at her 1970 solo show at California State University at Fullerton, that read: "Judy Gerowitz hereby divests herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance and chooses her own name, Judy Chicago." An advertisement with the same statement was placed in Artforum's October 1970 issue.
Career
1970s
Chicago is considered one of the "first-generation feminist artists," a group that also includes Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneeman, and Rachel Rosenthal. They were part of the feminist art movement in Europe and the United States in the early 1970s to develop feminist writing and art.In 1970, Chicago began teaching full-time at Fresno State College, hoping to teach women the skills needed to express the female perspective in their work. At Fresno, she planned a class that would consist only of women and decided to teach off campus to escape "the presence and hence, the expectations of men." She taught the first women's art class in the fall of 1970 at Fresno State College. It became the Feminist Art Program, a full 15-unit program, in the spring of 1971. This was the first feminist art program in the United States. Fifteen students studied under Chicago at Fresno State College: Dori Atlantis, Susan Boud, Gail Escola, Vanalyne Green, Suzanne Lacy, Cay Lang, Karen LeCocq, Jan Lester, Chris Rush, Judy Schaefer, Henrietta Sparkman, Faith Wilding, Shawnee Wollenman, Nancy Youdelman, and Cheryl Zurilgen. Together, as the Feminist Art Program, these women rented and refurbished an off-campus studio at 1275 Maple Avenue in downtown Fresno. Here they collaborated on art, held reading groups, and discussion groups about their life experiences which then influenced their art. All of the students and Chicago contributed $25 per month to rent the space and to pay for materials.
Later, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro reestablished the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts. After Chicago left for Cal Arts, the class at Fresno State College was continued by Rita Yokoi from 1971 to 1973, and then by Joyce Aiken in 1973, until her retirement in 1992.
Chicago's image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.
With Arlene Raven and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Chicago co-founded the Los Angeles Woman's Building in 1973. This art school and exhibition space was in a structure named after a pavilion at the 1893 World's Colombian Exhibition that featured art made by women from around the world. This housed the Feminist Studio Workshop, described by the founders as "an experimental program in female education in the arts". They wrote: "our purpose is to develop a new concept of art, a new kind of artist and a new art community built from the lives, feelings, and needs of women." During this period Chicago began creating spray-painted canvases, primarily abstract, with geometric forms on them. These works evolved, using the same medium, to become more centered around the meaning of the "feminine". Chicago was strongly influenced by Gerda Lerner.
Chicago's first book, Through the Flower, "chronicled her struggles to find her own identity as a woman artist".