In addition to being a prolific artist and the author of eleven published books, Judy Chicago pioneered a unique, content-based pedagogy that helps art students find their individual voices while aspiring to aesthetic excellence. Her methodology dates back to the early 1970's when she set up the first program aimed at women students at California State University, Fresno. At that time, although the preponderance of undergraduates in art school were female, few became practicing professionals. Chicago set out to change this; out of the fifteen Fresno students, nine became successful professional artists.

Womanhouse

Cock and Cunt

Bridal Staircase

After a year, Chicago was invited to bring her program to the California Institute of the Arts (Cal-Arts), a new school north of Los Angeles, where she team taught with artist Miriam Schapiro. The Feminist Art Program produced Womanhouse, the first female-centered art installation. Womanhouse - whose reverberations are still felt today - jump-started the Feminist Art movement which went on to become a global phenomenon, introducing new subject matter, media and approaches to art making.

Women's Building

In 1973, Chicago partnered with the late art historian Arlene Raven and renowned designer Sheila De Bretteville to found the Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW), the first independent feminist art program. The FSW was housed in the Woman's Building, co-founded by Chicago, Raven and De Bretteville, and based upon the name of a pavilion in the 1893 Chicago World's Fair that exhibited arts and crafts by women from all over the world.

Installation view from SINsation 2

Installation view from SINsation

Title Wall

The following year, Chicago stopped teaching in order to focus entirely upon studio work, going on to create a wide-ranging body of art, including her most famous work, The Dinner Party, a monumental, multi-media symbolic history of women in Western Civilization. The Dinner Party She did not return to academia until 1999 when she began a series of semester-long residencies at universities around the country. Her first appointment was at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she facilitated a project class that culminated in an exhibition at the I.M. Pei designed art museum on campus. Titled SINsation (after the controversial exhibition of young British artists at the Brooklyn Museum), the student show garnered large audiences and universal acclaim.

Birth & Creation piece

Women's History House

In 2000, Chicago held appointments at both Duke University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC). The UNC class was a graduate seminar while at Duke, she facilitated a class called "From Theory to Practice" in which she guided students in projects based upon three subjects that she had explored in her own work: women's history (The Dinner Party, 1974-1979); birth and creation (the Birth Project ,1980-1985); and the Holocaust (Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light, 1985-1993), created in collaboration with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman. Again, an exhibition was held at the end of the semester which so impressed the administration that they held it over so that it could be seen by students and faculty across the campus.

At Home Project Group Photo

In 2001, in celebration of the thirty-year anniversary of the famed Womanhouse, Chicago and Woodman were invited to re-visit the subject of the home in a project class for both women and men at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. Working with students and a selected number of professional artists from the community, Chicago and Woodman introduced Chicago's teaching methods to male students. The At Home project drew a wide audience and became the basis for a traveling exhibition along with art historical scholarship by writers like Dr. Vivien Green Fryd of Vanderbilt University and Dr. Viki Thompson Wylder of the University Art Museum at Florida State University, who is an acknowledged expert on Chicago's oeuvre.

Envisioning the Future

Envisioning the Future Installation view

2003 brought another team-taught project when Chicago and Woodman facilitated "Envisioning the Future", a public/private partnership in the Pomona Arts Colony, east of Los Angeles. Working with a group of seventy students and professional artists from around southern California, the couple oversaw the training of team facilitators who guided their students in the creation of a twelve-site exhibition exploring the subject of the future. Five years later, there was a project reunion which was attended by a majority of the participants, a testament to the ties that developed between them as a result of the project. Additionally, the project mural became the signature image for the city of Pomona.

Participants at Vanderbilt University

Performance by Debangshu Roychoudhury

Paintings by Fumiko Futamura

Installation by Eric Allen Smith

In 2005, Chicago and Woodman became the first Chancellor's Artists in Residence at Vanderbilt University, where they again facilitated students and local artists in a project called "Invoke/Evoke/Provoke". The class worked in the Cohen Building on the Peabody campus, a 13,000 square foot Beaux-Arts building that became the site of an exhibition that - true to its title - provoked considerable discourse on the campus and in the surrounding community, demonstrating that art could play a far more important role on campus than had been assumed by previous administrations.

Since that time, in recognition of The Dinner Party's important place in history, Chicago has been at work with a stellar team of art educators (led by the distinguished curriculum writer, Dr. Marilyn Stewart) to create a K-12 Dinner Party curriculum which can educate, empower and inspire students at all grade levels. This project is being sponsored by Through the Flower, a 501-c3 non profit arts organization founded by Judy Chicago in 1978 that provides educational programs to ensure that women's achievements will become a permanent part of our cultural heritage. Through the Flower

Seminar at Santa Fe Art Institute

Because art educators are increasingly turning to on-line materials, the Dinner Party curriculum will be presented as a series of free, downloadable pdf files on Through the Flower's website. Teachers will be able to select materials that are relevant to their particular grade levels and respective school environments. These downloadable files will be supplemented by modestly priced visual materials intended to aid teachers in the implementation of the curriculum. In 2010, Through the Flower will begin to offer K-12 Summer Workshops to help art educators maximize the potential of the curriculum.

Dinner Party Curriculum Team

The curriculum team has worked closely with Judy Chicago to design a curriculum that is grounded in a deep study of The Dinner Party, one that encourages open-ended inquiry, self-reflection and personal connection-making while helping students learn that there are many ways to be involved in art. Its main components involve sixteen learning 'encounters' each of which includes lesson plans suitable for a variety of grade levels. Although these Encounters present different approaches to The Dinner Party, they are all based upon enduring ideas about human experience as well as the students' lived experiences.


The Encounters are grouped in a sequence with particular goals in mind. The first section, Encountering The Dinner Party introduces students to the art. The second section, Raising Consciousness, is intended to help students think about gender and how it shapes them as individuals, also how The Dinner Party acts to raise consciousness about gender issues. Section Three, Creating Context, helps students understand the content and context of The Dinner Party by making connections to other works of art, examining the piece in an art historical context and also, in terms of women's cultural production and its ongoing exclusion from history.

The fourth section, Exploring The Dinner Party, provides modes of study of the symbolism and meaning of the components of the work; the artist's intentions; along with her use of metaphor. The last section, Building on The Dinner Party, demonstrates the way in which the study of an individual place setting can lead to an entire curriculum, in this case, one that focuses upon Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) and the Suffrage Movement. Because The Dinner Party Curriculum is part of a multi-year educational project encompassing teachers' materials, training workshops, lectures and related cultural programs, Through the Flower anticipates that this section will grow and expand in the coming years.

DPCP Summer Institute Group Photo

DPCP Summer Institute

Lecture at Through the Flower

Judy Chicago and Susannah Rodee with winners of the exhibition NM Feminists Under Forty

For more information about the launch of the Curriculum Project and Through the Flower's educational programs, check Through the Flower on a regular basis.



When Judy Chicago created The Dinner Party (a monumental, multi-media tribute to the contributions of women in Western Civilization now permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum), it was with the intention of educating a broad and diverse audience about women's achievements. Over the years, teachers all over the world began doing classroom projects based upon The Dinner Party. Although Through the Flower (the non-profit arts organization founded by Judy Chicago in 1978) assembled a small archive documenting some of these projects, neither Judy Chicago nor the Board paid a lot of attention to them other than being pleased that this work of art was providing inspiration to teachers.

However, with the permanent housing of The Dinner Party, Judy Chicago began to review some of these undertakings, which caused her to realize that it might be important to provide some guidelines for teachers, some of whom were using the piece in what she considered to be inappropriate ways. As a result, she teamed up with art educator and Through the Flower Board Member, Dr. Constance Bumgarner Gee, to discuss developing a Dinner Party curriculum for K-12 teachers.

In the Summer of 2010, Through the Flower will begin to offer intensive workshops at their headquarters in Belen for teachers who are interested in expanding their understanding of how to best engage students in the Dinner Party curriculum so that they are informed, inspired and empowered by it.


Dr. Constance Bumgarner Gee, Project Director: Associate Professor of Public Policy and Education at the Peabody College at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. Dr. Gee teaches an introductory public policy course for the Human and Organizational Development Department and had taught Public Policy, the Arts, and Arts Education for the Department of Leadership, Policy and Organizations. Her primary research focus is on the effects and consequences of public policy and programming on the quality, content, and accessibility of K-12 arts education. She has served as an executive editor for Arts Education Policy Review since 1997, and also serves on the board of directors for the First Center for the Visual Arts, and on the advisory board of Vanderbilt's Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy.

Dr. Marilyn Stewart, Project Director: Professor of Art Education, Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA. Known for her ability to translate difficult art education concepts into practical, inquiry-based activities for the classroom, she is author of Thinking Through Aesthetics and co-author of Rethinking Curriculum in Art, series editor of the Art Education in Practice series by Davis Publications, and co-author, with Eldon Katter, of Davis's three-text middle school art program, Art: A Global Pursuit, Art: A Community Connection, and Art: A Personal Journey. A frequent speaker and consultant to numerous national projects and the 2006 Art Educator of the Year in Pennsylvania, Dr. Stewart was the Getty Education Institute for the Arts 1997-1998 Visiting Scholar and has conducted over 160 extended staff development institutes, seminars, or workshops in over 25 states.

Dr. Peg Speirs: Associate Professor of Art Education, Department of Art Education and Crafts, Kutztown University. Dr. Speirs has authored and co-authored articles for publication and co-edited the text, Contemporary Issues in Art Education (2002), published by Prentice Hall.

Dr. Carrie Nordlund: Assistant Professor of Art Education at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. In her previous position as District Art Chair for the Independence Missouri Public Schools she supervised curriculum and assessment development and implementation for K-12 arts programs. She maintains an art exhibition record promoting an ethic of teacher as artist and researcher.


Participatory Art Pedagogy www.throughtheflower.org/pedagogy/