“
I don't think art can change the world. The arts can provide education, inspire, and empower people to act.
—Judy Chicago
”
A woman who named herself in order to escape the influence of patriarchy, a brave creator who obsessed with depicting female imagery, an artist who experienced discrimination and led an unprecedented wave of feminism...
Judy Chicago is now 82 years old, but she still hasn't stopped working. In 2018, Judy was named one of the "Top 100 Most Influential People" by Time magazine, but her influence would have been in the top 10 if she were in art history.
◤Judy Chicago，2020年 / © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © Donald Woodman/ARS, NY
On August 28, 2021, the de Young Museum in San Francisco opened Judy Chicago's first major retrospective, looking back at her 60-year creative life, featuring about 150 Chicago-created paintings, drawings, ceramic sculptures, and prints. What has this representative of feminist art, a pioneer artist who has been ahead of the world mainstream for fifty years, left for our world?
◤ "Judy Chicago: A Retrospective", Diyang Art Museum / Gary Sexton
Judy Chicago was born on July 20, 1939, to a left-wing Jewish family in Chicago, originally known as Judith Sylvia Cohen. His father was a Marxist post office worker, and his mother was a former professional dancer who later became a medical institution secretary. Her parents discovered her talent from an early age and sent her to an after-school class at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Judy's father is passionate about social movements and projects this idealism onto his daughter, hoping that in the future she will make a difference and contribute to society. At home, they always discussed politics, the working class, minorities, and women's equal rights, which set the stage for Judy's later artistic career.
◤ Chicago in the 60s / Pinterest, YouTube
After graduating from high school, Judy went to UCLA to study art, earning a bachelor's degree in fine arts in 1962 and a master's degree in liberal arts in 1964. After marrying, Judy took her husband's surname, changed her name to Judy Gerowitz, and began displaying her artwork locally in Los Angeles. In 1963, Judy's first husband died in a car accident.
She wandered around Los Angeles, where she worked independently, but received countless "advices": "You can't be a woman and an artist at the same time." Judy, of course, felt frustrated and unwilling, and faced with a lot of resistance, found that if she wanted to be taken seriously by the so-called art circles, she had to cater to the popular modernist style of the time and abandon her aesthetic ideals. The retrospective at the DiYang Museum includes some of Judy's lesser-known works before she became famous, such as some minimalist sculptures she completed in Los Angeles in the 1960s.
◤Top: Chicago in the 1960s / Twitter; Bottom: Rainbow Pickett installed in the Diyang Art Museum / Drew Altizer, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
In Los Angeles in the sixties, the art industry was developing rapidly, but it was quite unfriendly to women, even more male-dominated and cruel than mainstream society. To find her place and discourse, Judy began reading the literature of the late 1960s that sprung up in the women's movement, including, in her own words, "something akin to existential relief."
In 1967, Judy created a series of smoke performance artworks, Atmospheres, which she described as an attempt to "soften and feminize the California landscape." She spreads colored smoke into the air, releasing color from the limitations of painting and sculpture. While the male artists who were also active in California's "Light and Space Movement" at the time—Michael Heizer, James Turrell, Robert Smithson, and others—were busy transforming the earth into art, Judy was in a different way that almost left no trace of environmental intervention, explosive, ephemeral, dreamy...
◤《Immolation》（上）和《Smoke Bodies》（下），来自「Women and Smoke」系列，1972年 / © Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Through the Flower Archives
Judy's appearance on the front page of the "Feminist Art" chapter of art history is also related to the fact that she first proposed a women's art program at California State University, Fresno. As early as 1969, she proposed a special course that, in addition to emphasizing women's re-identification with themselves, also called on women to replace the model of male competition with a collective cooperative creative approach.
◤上：《Through the Flower 2》，1973年 / © Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York，Donald Woodman拍摄 / ARS, New York；下：《Let it All Hang Out》，1973年 / © Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York，Donald Woodman拍摄，New Orleans Museum of Art
In 1970, she announced her name as Judy Chicago, taking her birthplace as her surname as a symbol of herself as an independent woman. After embracing her feminist identity, Chicago began to spread her ideas and ideas through her artwork.
She began to delve into the genre of art that has historically been classified as "feminine craftsmanship", based on the belief that the female experience can be as vital to the broader human condition as the male experience.
◤ Chicago poses in the boxing ring where Muhammad Ali once trained, wearing a sweatshirt engraved with her chosen name / © Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Through the Flower Archives
In 1973, she co-founded "Womanhouse" with artist Miriam Schapiro, a feminist gallery space and time-limited installation exhibition that is at the forefront of history, and is also an artistic experiment that explores the female experience. The duo were co-founders of the CalArts Feminist Project, and The Woman's House was the first feminist public exhibition in history. On the first day of the exhibition, only female visitors are allowed, after that, it is open to all visitors.
Top: Cover of "Women's House" in Chicago / Through the Flower Archives; Part 2: Menstruation Bathroom, rebuilt in 1995 / © Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Donald Woodman / ARS, New York
One of the most famous and memorable exhibits is Judy Chicago's Menstruation Bathroom. The room was painted into a pure white bathroom, the shelves were covered with a layer of gauze, the only trash can filled with used tampons, red blood hit the white background, and it was made public as a "women's secret", which shocked the audience.
Given that many people are still shy about discussing anything about menstruation in today's public context, judy's forward-looking and courageous creations appeared in the 1970s, which is simply unimaginable.
◤《The Dinner Party》，1974–1979年, mixed media / © Judy Chicago
This large-scale retrospective exhibition of the Diyang Art Museum coincides with the forty-odd anniversary of The Dinner Party, which is widely regarded as the first large-scale feminist artwork in history, and it is also quite meaningful.
In the years since the Advent of The Dinner, the status and situation of women in society has changed dramatically, perhaps not enough. So what kind of work is "Dinner Party"? How did it leave such a deep mark on an artist's career and in the history of art?
Part 1: The Dinner Party's Sapper's Table Placement (Top) and Bodica Plate (Bottom), 1974–1979 / © Judy Chicago, by Donald Woodman
Beginning in 1973, Judy and more than 100 volunteers and assistants who supported her creative ideas completed this epic work. Made of ceramics, embroidery, weaving, and other common so-called "female crafts," "The Dinner" uses words and patterns to represent 39 important women in history—including Sacagawe, who pioneered the wilderness of the American West, Georgia O'Keeffe, Elizabeth I, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, an important twentieth-century female artist. Exclusive tableware and table towels were designed, and then all combined into a triangular pyramid platform device.
Each piece of tableware is designed with feminine physical features inspired by delicate and beautiful embroidered table towels underneath the tableware. Judy tries to rewrite the history of women's participation with shocking visual power.
◤Top: Chicago Painting Virginia Woolf Plate, 1978 / Courtesy Through the Flower Archives; Part 2: "Dinner Party" Workers Paint Names on Heritage Floor Tiles, 1978 / Courtesy of Through the Flower Archive.
Explaining the intent of the creation, Judy once said, "My 'Dinner Party' is also an expression of human history... As women, the absence of history seems to make us psychologically crippled, and I want to change all this, change all this through art."
In 1979, the work was first unveiled at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MoMA) and immediately caused a sensation, which became her famous work and representative work. The work was exhibited everywhere until 2002, when it was purchased by the Brooklyn Museum for permanent collection, and displayed in the museum's specially designed exhibition hall, becoming a "treasure of the town".
◤Through the Flower Archives
From then on, Judy continued to explore large-scale installations and created another important work, The Birth Project, between 1980 and 1985. She shared in an interview with Art Basel that when some people questioned her "how can you paint the image of fertility without giving birth to a baby", she dismissed it: "You don't need to be crucified to paint the crucifixion of Jesus?" 」
Created in a similar way to Dinner, Judy invited more than 150 embroidery craftsmen to collaborate on a series of images celebrating all aspects of the reproductive process. These embroiderers applied and selected, and participated remotely in various regions of the United States, Canada, and New Zealand, and finally completed this work full of historical significance.
◤《Earth Birth》（上）和《Mother India》（下），来自「The Birth Project」系列，1983–1985年 / © Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Donald Woodman拍摄 / ARS, NY
In 1994, Judy began her seminal career series Resolutions: A Stitch in Time, leading the sewing workers she had worked with for many years to combine paintings and sewing works to reinterpret traditional aphorisms in a witty way.
Indeed, whether it's "The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light," a mid-1980s work delving into Jewish identity, or "The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction," which focused on environmentalism in 2015. Judy is very sensitive to changes in society and curious about all topics worth exploring.
◤Top: Home Sweet Home, from resolutions: A Stitch in Time series, 2000 / © Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Donald Woodman / ARS, NY; Bottom: Rainbow Shabbat Stained Glass, 1992 / Artsy
Many young female artists ask Judy, "What is it like to be called a feminist artist?" It was as if "feminist art" was a style like "Impressionism" or "Expressionism".
Is being called a "feminist artist" all his life is ironclad evidence that gender equality still has a long way to go? After all, if an artist's creative interest is concentrated on men, no one will call him a "masculine artist"... Just because Judy Chicago continues to create and express images of women, she will never be able to separate herself from the feminist movement. Of course, she was also a warrior.
From deciding to change her name, to not pandering to trends, to moving the topic of women that people shy away from to the most prominent places, what Judy has done in her life — whether it falls on paper or not — is creating art history.
◤ Collier Schorr shot