This fall, her work will be featured in eight exhibitions in the United States and abroad—from New York to Istanbul and Australia. Over the past six decades, Chicago has always had faith in art history and her perseverance has finally paid off. These recent shows have not only secured Chicago’s place in art history but have provided the foundation and framework within which her work can be fully contextualized. Additionally, the next few months will include a number of major media features that will bring her ideas and accomplishments to a broad, international audience. Of particular note is Chicago’s upcoming appearance on Dan Rubinstein’s critically acclaimed podcast, The Grand Tourist, which focuses on the book, Revelations; a publication that provides insight into the underlying vision and philosophy that has guided her unique career.
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Judy Chicago invites you to watch this conversation between her, Nadya Tolokonnikova, one of the founders of Pussy Riot and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of Serpentine. Across generations, cultures and geography, Nadya and I made a deep connection because of our shared belief that the world can be transformed into a place of justice and equity for everyone who shares this planet - both human and non-human. And we invite you to participate in our project "What If Women Ruled the World?" (sponsored by Dmniti) that asks a series of questions around that query, because neither Nadya nor I am interested in patriarchy. Rather, the world which we envision is only achievable if Women around the globe become true partners with men.
July 1, 2024
Doors open from 8:15 to 8:45 PM.
LUMA Arles
Parc des Ateliers
Arles, France
LUMA Arles and Judy Chicago cordially invite you to A Homage to Arles an immersive smoke sculpture® by Judy Chicago. Commissioned by LUMA on the occasion of Judy Chicago's first retrospective exhibition in Europe "Herstory", organized in collaboration with the New Museum, New York. A Homage to Arles is the first large-scale immersive smoke sculpture created by Chicago in Europe.
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June 29, 2024 – September 29, 2024
LUMA Arles
35 Av. Victor Hugo
13200 Arles, France
LUMA Arles’ presentation of “Judy Chicago: Herstory” spans more than sixty years of the iconic feminist artist’s career for the most expansive exhibition of her work in Europe to date. On view from June 29 to September 29, 2024, “Herstory” traces Chicago’s practice from her early experiments in Minimalism to her confrontations of social inequity, the construct of masculinity, mortality, and environmental disaster. Contextualizing Chicago’s feminist methodology within the many art movements in which she participated—and from whose histories she has frequently been erased—“Herstory” showcases Chicago’s tremendous impact over many decades. LUMA Arles’ presentation of “Judy Chicago: Herstory” is curated by Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, Director of Exhibitions and Programs.
June 18th, 2024
Fifty years in the making, a radical retelling of human history in the form of an illuminated manuscript by acclaimed artist and author Judy Chicago, published in collaboration with Serpentine.
Revelations is the work that Judy Chicago believed would never be published. In 5 parts, this book takes readers from mythological creation and a time when women ruled the Earth to a violent divide between women and men, then tracing the stories of emblematic historic women, driving the narrative from the biblical city of Bethulia through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to 20th-century America. Begun alongside her iconic installation The Dinner Party in the mid-1970s, and drawing on her intensive research into goddess worship and women’s history, Revelations is foundational to Chicago’s decades-long practice.
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May 22, 2024 – September 1, 2024
Serpentine North Gallery
W Carriage Dr
London W2 2AR, United Kingdom
In Summer 2024, Serpentine will present an exhibition of trailblazing artist, author, educator and feminist icon Judy Chicago (b. 1939, Chicago, USA; lives and works in New Mexico, USA). Revelations will be Chicago’s first solo presentation in a major London institution. One of the most provocative and influential artists working today, Chicago came to prominence in the late 1960s when she challenged the male-dominated landscape of the art world by making work that was boldly from a woman’s perspective.
May 17, 2024 – October 6, 2024
Jewish Museum Berlin
Old Building, level 1
Lindenstraße 9–14, 10969 Berlin
The exhibition plays with the differing perceptions of sexuality in Judaism. Modern and contemporary art, traditional artifacts, film, and new media illustrate a range of Jewish positions that have been discussed for centuries in the canon of rabbinic literature. From the central importance of marriage and procreation, via desire, taboos, and the questioning of social norms, to the eroticism of spirituality, the exhibition presents the whole spectrum of Jewish attitudes and shows that traditional debates are highly relevant to present-day Jewish positions on sexuality.
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April 26, 2024 - November 2, 2024
Villa Carmignac, Porquerolles
Île de Porquerolles, La Courtade
83400 Hyères, France
Organised thematically, the exhibition draws on ideas of myths and monsters in the representation of women to reflect on womanhood in all its many guises. Ultimately, the works in the exhibition disrupt conventional ideas of womanhood to reflect on feminine power and how the representation of women has shaped global cultural attitudes.
October 12, 2023 – March 3, 2024
New Museum
235 Bowery
New York NY 10002
GREAT NEWS! I'm thrilled to announce the New Museum will be presenting "Judy Chicago: Herstory," occupying three floors of the museum, from October 12, 2023 to March 3, 2024. The first comprehensive New York museum survey of my work, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, "Herstory" will span my sixty-year career and encompass its breadth across painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, textiles, photography, stained glass, needlework, and printmaking. I will also be honored at this year's New Museum Annual Spring Gala on April 17.
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July 1, 2023 at 2 PM
Through the Flower Art Space
107 Becker Ave
Belen, NM 87002
Please join me for a special book signing event with Russian activist and founding member of Pussy Riot, Nadya Tolokonnikova. My very special discussion with Nadya, moderated by Tonya Turner Carroll, will follow a screening of "What If Women Ruled the World?"; a short film that launched my historic participatory project with Nadya to create change, gender equality and a more equitable world.
This event will be live streamed via my Instagram and Through the Flower's YouTube. The event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited.
American feminist and contemporary artist Judy Chicago and Russian activist and founding member of Pussy Riot Nadya Tolokonnikova invite you to join this participatory artwork, support gender equality and create change. All who share feminist values are invited to come together and make their voices heard at this urgent time for women’s right.
Choose a single question or respond to as many questions as you want. Written messages and visual images submitted here will be reviewed and selected contributions will be shaped by the artists into a new collaborative project, with the mission of creating a foundation for the largest gender rights community in Web3.
This project took Chicago’s inspiring banners What If Women Ruled the World, which were created in collaboration with Maria Grazia Chiuri for the Dior Spring Summer 2020 Haute Couture show, as its source for a new revolutionary blockchain enabled call-and-response.
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September 24, 2022
On Saturday, September 24th, the National Women's Hall of Fame will celebrate the Induction of Octavia E. Butler, Judy Chicago, Rebecca Halstead, Mia Hamm, Joy Harjo, Emily Howland, Katherine Johnson, Indra Nooyi, and Michelle Obama with a ceremony at the Smith Opera House in Geneva, NY. The ceremony will be livestreamed to Youtube.
June 4, 2022
Dusk (8:00 PM – 8:45 PM)
Sugar Beach
11 Dockside Drive
Toronto ON
M5A 1B6
Marking the closing of the 2022 festival, the Toronto Biennial of Art presents a newly commissioned site-specific work by artist Judy Chicago. This one-of-a-kind Smoke Sculpture™ will be visible from the shore of Lake Ontario, as a series of environmentally safe, non-toxic coloured smokes are released from a barge. For this one-time performance, the public is invited to gather at the waterfront to see the lake and sky transformed. Harkening back to Chicago’s Atmospheres photo series of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which sought to soften and “feminize” harsh, man-made environments, A Tribute to Toronto works against the tradition of male Land Art artists whose work imposed itself on the earth. Instead, Chicago’s performance offers an alternative and impermanent approach that merges colour with landscape to increase awareness of the beauty of our natural environment.
A Tribute to Toronto (2022) is commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art and made possible with the generous support of the City of Toronto, ArtworxTO, the Delaney Family Foundation, Menkes Developments, Waterfront Toronto, the Waterfront BIA, and the Women Leading Initiative.
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June 18, 2022 – October 9, 2022
Through the Flower Art Space
107 Becker Avenue
Belen, NM 87002
Judy Chicago invites you to discover Wo/Manhouse 2022!
Thanks to the generous support of the board of Through the Flower, Wo/Manhouse 2022 is free to the public for the final three weeks of the exhibition and performances.
Wo/Manhouse 2022 is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the collaborative work initiated by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, Womanhouse. The exhibition is a contemporary reimagining of the original Womanhouse in a local home where nineteen New Mexican artists from across the gender spectrum have created their own artwork exploring the meaning of home, gender, and inclusivity. It also features historic and contemporary performances, a curated selection from the International Honor Quilt, and a historical exhibition, Looking Back at Womanhouse, on the original work.
April 8, 2022
National Building Museum
The gala honored Dior’s first woman Creative Director Maria Grazia Chiuri, feminist artist Judy Chicago, and co-CEO and president of Ariel Investments Mellody Hobson each with NMWA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
The gala displayed the English banners from The Female Divine, Judy Chicago’s collaboration with Maria Grazia Chiuri, Creative Director for Christian Dior, for the Spring/Summer 2020 haute couture show.
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March 3, 2022
When I first started posting on Instagram, I thought it would be a good way to reach and broaden my audience, especially among young people because I think it is important to have cross-generational conversations. But I wanted my posts to have meaning and substance. However - like too much of the internet (which originally promised to bring greater democracy and education around the world) - social media has also brought trolling, on-line harassment and contributed to hate crimes and violence around the globe. Moreover, outlet by outlet, commerce has come to dominate social media, which is now happening on Instagram. As a result, we will continue to do posts about various happenings but as of today, we are launching the Chicago Gazette, a regular report from me that you can subscribe to for free. You will also be able to ask questions and/or suggest topics that you would like me to address. In order to subscribe, just give us your name and e-mail address to receive the Chicago Gazette straight to your inbox.
NEWS FLASH; After months of having to keep this under wraps, we are thrilled to announce that on Sunday, January 2nd, CBS Sunday Morning will present a segment on me and my work. I had the great pleasure of being interviewed by the formidable journalist, Martha Teichner. What a great way to start 2022!
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October 16, 2021, dusk
de Young Museum
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
San Francisco, CA 94118
Join us for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see Judy Chicago’s multicolored, site-specific Atmospheres performance: Forever de Young. This open-air performance is in celebration of the artist’s exhibition Judy Chicago: A Retrospective, now on view at the de Young museum. This piece, in collaboration with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman and long-time pyrotechnic partner Chris Souza of Pyro Spectaculars, marks her largest and most complex mixing of color in the air—an extension of her long-time interest in the emotive capacity of color.
Forever de Young is sponsored by the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation in honor of his late mother, Arlene Schnitzer, an ardent art collector, gallerist and long-time member of the Board of the de Young Museum.
August 28, 2021 – January 9, 2022
de Young Museum
Golden Gate Park
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
San Francisco, CA 94118
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco celebrate pioneering feminist artist Judy Chicago with a retrospective spanning from her early engagement with the Californian Light and Space Movement in the 1960s to her current body of work, a searing investigation of mortality and environmental devastation, begun in 2015. The exhibition includes approximately 130 paintings, prints, drawings, and ceramic sculptures, in addition to ephemera, several films, and a documentary. Together, these works of art chart the boundary-pushing path of the artist named Cohen by birth and Gerowitz by marriage, who, after trying to fit into the patriarchal structure of the Los Angeles art world, decided to change her name and the course of history.
Organized on the heels of the 40th anniversary of Chicago's landmark installation, The Dinner Party, in San Francisco and opening in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of women’s right to vote across the United States, Judy Chicago: A Retrospective pays homage to an artist whose lifelong fight against the suppression and erasure of women’s creativity has finally come full circle.
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Since the fall of 2019, which seems like a lifetime ago, I embarked on a long journey of self-reflection as I revisited my two earlier autobiographies, 'Through the Flower' and 'Beyond the Flower'. It was like having an in-depth conversation with my younger self. As I result, I decided to reexamine my life and career, update the story I began in 1975 and add a whole new section to deal with how much has changed since 1996, when 'Beyond the Flower' ended. On this last day of Women’s History Month, I am so excited to unveil the cover for my complete autobiography 'The Flowering' which will hopefully be inspiring, empowering, and useful to anyone interested in making a change—a goal which has fueled my career. The Flowering, with a foreword by Gloria Steinem, will be published on July 20, 2021—coincidentally my 82nd birthday—by Thames & Hudson. Through the Flower, the non-profit arts organization that I founded in 1977, is now taking orders for SIGNED copies!
July 17, 2021 at Dusk
Through the Flower Art Space
107 Becker Avenue
Belen, New Mexico 87002
Judy Chicago, Donald Woodman, and their long-time collaborators, Pyro Spectaculars, will present “Diamonds in the Sky,” a new, site-specific Smoke Sculpture™ at Through the Flower Art Space located at 107 Becker Ave, Belen, NM on Saturday, July 17th at dusk.
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Bringing individuals together through their experience of the work, Judy Chicago Rainbow AR unfolds as an interactive performance, releasing plumes of smoke and changing color. Curling and billowing across the viewers’ screens, the work will invite audiences to interact with the smoke, walking through or around it. Produced in close collaboration with Pyro Spectaculars, Light Art Space, and experienced designers International Magic
Date: November 11, 2020 – November 15, 2020
Hall B West Bund Art Center
2555 Longteng Ave
Xuhui District, Shanghai, China
Based on its own collection system, the Longlati Non-profit Foundation has joined hands with Judy Chicago and Stanley Whitney to present their seminal works to Chinese audiences. This exhibition is supported by Lisson Gallery and Salon 94 Gallery and is curated by Sun Wenjie.
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Judy Chicago is back for a second collaboration with Dior – and this time, you can walk away with it. The artist designed the monumental set for Maria Grazia Chiuri’s spring haute couture show in January: a tent shaped like a goddess figure, filled with 21 banners embroidered with feminist messages. Now she is one of 10 artists tasked with customizing the Lady Dior handbag for the fifth edition of the Dior Lady Art project.
Oregon-based philanthropist and owner of one of the world’s most important post-war and contemporary print collections, Jordan D. Schnitzer, the President of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, has acquired the significant print archive of world-renowned artist Judy Chicago, whose art has pushed the boundaries of technology and subject matter for her entire six-decade career. Chicago’s print archive and the associated studies and process works represent her journey as a woman artist in an art world long dominated by male artists, curators, and critics.
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I am pleased to announce the Nevada Museum of Art's recent acquisition of my fireworks archive for its Center for Art + Environment Archive Collections. The archive, Judy Chicago: Dry Ice, Smoke, and Fireworks, contains materials from my extensive body of work with dry ice, colored smoke, and fireworks, manifested in 45 projects spanning from 1967 through the present. These objects include thousands of photographs, digital images, slides, 16 mm films, correspondence, drawings, maps, notes, maquettes, clothing, and a limited edition set of prints.
At the invitation of the Creative Director of women’s collections Maria Grazia Chiuri, Judy Chicago designs the Dior Spring-Summer 2020 Haute Couture show set displaying a series of large appliquéd and embroidered banners, posing a range of questions around the evolution of the role and power of women through the ages, starting with “What if Women Ruled the World?”
The monumental sculpture "The Female Divine", created for the Dior Couture Spring-Summer 2020 show, contains the runway at the Musée Rodin in Paris.
Being hailed as “one of the most ambitious art-and-fashion partnerships in recent years” (artnet news), a “feminine tour-de-force” (CR Fashionbook), and the “coup of her career” (Prestige Magazine), media coverage of the collaboration spanned the globe and exploded on social media outlets.
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JUDY CHICAGO
16 November 2019 – 19 April 2020
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art
S Shore Rd, Gateshead NE8 3BA, United Kingdom
In her 80th birthday year, BALTIC presents the first major UK survey of pioneering feminist artist, author and educator Judy Chicago. The exhibition spans Chicago's fifty-year career, from her early actions in the desert in the 1970s, to her most recent series, The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction (2013–16), which has not been previously shown outside of the US.
October 17, 2019
The Judy Chicago Portal bridges Judy Chicago collection housed in three institutions: Penn State University, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Bringing together a public university library, a private institutional library, and a museum allows-in this rare collaboration- for the potential of each repository to consider and embrace new audiences and their collective interested in Judy Chicago’s oeuvre and overall impact.
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September 19, 2019–January 20, 2020
National Museum of Women in the Arts
1250 New York Ave NW
Washington, D.C. 20005
Through this series, the artist reflects on her own mortality and appeals for compassion and justice for all earthly creatures affected by human greed. Chicago’s bold, graphic style viscerally communicates the intense emotion she experienced while contemplating her own death as well as the death of entire species. The exhibition is organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts and made possible by the MaryRoss Taylor Exhibition Fund.
September 7–November 2, 2019
Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, LA
925 N Orange Drive, Los Angeles
Judy Chicago created a remarkable body of work in Los Angeles and Fresno from 1965 - 72 that has been largely unseen for fifty years. Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles will present a full survey of these early works from September 7 – November 2, 2019. The exhibition will feature paintings, drawings, sculpture, installations, and documentation of Chicago’s environmental and fireworks projects.
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July 20th - 21st, 2019
107 Becker Ave
Belen, NM 87002
Join us for the Grand Opening of the Through the Flower Art Space On the occasion of Judy Chicago's 80th birthday!
The Through the Flower Art Space is a center for educational resources and creative opportunities that connect visitors to cultural institutions across the US. Through the Flower Art Space features changing art exhibitions, a video and book library, and a permanent exhibition about Judy Chicago’s life and work.
The opening was accompanied by a very special fireworks performance by Judy Chicago, "A Birthday Bouquet for Belen." Many other events included a Judy Chicago Wines release party and a TTF sponsored Pop-up exhibition!
Judy Chicago doesn’t mince words. “In the ’60s and ’70s, you had to paint like you were a white guy if you wanted to show your work,” says the artist, whose 1979 feminist masterpiece, The Dinner Party, features the lady bits of historical and mythical women served up on supper plates.
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Sat, Feb 23, 2019
Doors open 5:30pm
Performance at sunset (6:15pm)
Jungle Plaza
3801 NE 1st Ave, Miami, FL 33137
ICA Miami presents a new site-specific performance by Judy Chicago in the Miami Design District Jungle Plaza. Entitled A Purple Poem for Miami, Chicago’s new smoke performance is presented as part of ICA Performs, the museum’s signature platform for the development of new and recent works from leading performance artists.
Judy Chicago: A Reckoning
December 4, 2018 - April 21, 2019
ICA Miami
61 NE 41st Street
Miami, FL 33137
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami presents “Judy Chicago: A Reckoning,” a major survey of works by the pioneering feminist artist. This exhibition highlights Chicago’s iconographic transition from abstraction to figuration, and explores the ways in which the artist’s strong feminist voice transforms our understanding of modernism and its traditions.
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Birth Project: Born Again
June 17, 2018–October 7, 2018
Pasadena Museum of California Art
490 Union St, Pasadena, CA
This exhibition reassembles approximately sixteen of the most exceptional Birth Project works, examining both past and present attitudes towards female empowerment and sexuality and underscoring Chicago’s redefinition of the terms art and craft. By presenting the works thirty-plus years after their creation, the exhibition emphasizes the role art can play in giving voice to the ongoing process of social change, particularly in regards to both reproductive choice and health care.
In a landmark year for feminism, interest from a younger generation as a result of societal changes in women’s rights have sparked a renewed interest in Judy Chicago as a pioneer of the feminist movement. Chicago is responsible for one of the most important artworks of the twentieth century, The Dinner Party (1974-79), an installation celebrating women’s achievements in Western culture in the form of a meticulously executed banquet table set for 39 mythical and historical women and honoring 999 others. The work is permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum as the centerpiece of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. On her inclusion in the TIME 100 list, Chicago says, “It is ironic that after all these years, where I was once critiqued I am now being lauded. My goal has been to make a contribution to a more equitable world through art and I am honored and thrilled that my work is being recognized now by TIME. I am grateful to all those who have supported me on this long and challenging journey.”
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"Then there’s our cover star, Judy Chicago, a medium- and genre-defying artist who, at 78, is and will be the subject of a number of major solo gallery and museum shows over the next 18 months. The past year saw her most celebrated work, the monumental (in all senses) “The Dinner Party” (1979) — a vulvic-inspired table with ceramic plates for 39 women from across the centuries, from Sappho to Virginia Woolf — become a pop-cultural touchstone, a visual shorthand for women’s exclusion from the annals of history and a revisionist fantasy: Here, literally, was their place at the table. " -HANYA YANAGIHARA
For ten years now, Judy Chicago’s 20th-century masterpiece The Dinner Party has been on permanent view at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in the Brooklyn Museum. It’s become such a fixture there that it is hard to imagine the shock and vitriol the piece caused when it was first displayed in 1979, after four years and hundreds of hands went into its production. The Dinner Party went against so many mores, even by progressive art-world standards: it was overtly political, its content directly championing women’s rights and liberation; it was constructed not by an auteur but by a community; it was comprised of ceramics and needlepoint, “decorative arts” associated with feminine domesticity. Chicago’s sculpture was—and is—radical, correcting the boldfaced names of history while inspiring a new way of conceiving open, activist art production. Amid the straightforward concept of 39 increasingly vaginal place settings, each reserved for a different groundbreaking woman, Chicago and her team filled the triangular structure with so many symbols and allusions that the reading of the work never stops. (Each side of the triangle, for instance, holds 13 place settings, which is the same number of seats at both The Last Supper and of witches in a coven.)
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October 20, 2017 - March 4, 2018
Brooklyn Museum
Brooklyn, NY
The Brooklyn Museum will host an extensive exhibition of rarely seen archival, process, and documentary material created during the making of Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party. This exhibition is a unique opportunity to view Chicago's seminal work, permanently housed at the Elizabeth A Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, alongside the historical documents, test materials, and ephemera which tell the story of this monumental artwork.
September 17, 2017 - January 5, 2018
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Washington, D.C.
NMWA presents, Inside the Dinner Party Studio, an exhibition exploring the studio environment during the creation of Judy Chicago's monumental work, The Dinner Party through archives, documentation, and film.
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The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington DC is proud to announce the creation of the Judy Chicago Visual Archive at the museum’s Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center. The archive will document Chicago’s career through photographs, slides, negatives and printed ephemera. These materials span the 1960s through the present and capture fleeting performance pieces such as her pyrotechnics and dry ice works, as well as exhibitions of drawings, paintings, sculpture and installations, including The Dinner Party. The visual archive will be an essential resource for researchers.
Judy Chicago was invited by Tate Liverpool to be one of 13 artists, musicians, and performers from the UK and abroad, each tasked with representing one of the tracks on the Beatles' seminal album, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, as part of a city-wide celebration of the album's 50th anniversary. For her assigned song, "Fixing A Hole," Judy designed a 40 foot high mural that was painted on the side of the monumental White Tomkins and Courage Grain Silo at Stanley Dock in Liverpool.
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On April 26th, Judy Chicago and a team of event assistants from across the US, built the artist's fourth dry ice installation, this time at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as part of the museum's celebration of their new building. The piece, titled "Be No More", was constructed during an all-day build with more than 20 tons (40,000 pounds) of dry ice and illuminated with hundreds of road flares. Throughout the day and into the evening, thousands of onlookers were attracted to the installation which spelled out the word "truth" as a metaphor for a new and disturbing reality in the U.S., the idea of alternative facts. In the evening, the word was lit from within with pink flares, which turned the entire environment a pearly pink. After dark, there was a second lighting which caused the brightly lit word to be reflected in the adjacent glass wall of the museum. Then, the lights faded and slowly, the ice sublimated (or disappeared). But for a short time—as she has done throughout her career—Judy Chicago attempted to speak truth to power.
Judy Chicago's work was featured in Salon 94's booth at Frieze Masters at Regent’s Park, London, UK, October 6 – 9, 2016.
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Judy Chicago's 1983 work Earth Birth from the Birth Project was showcased in Salon 94's Frieze New York booth. The New York gallery, founded by Jeanne Greenberg-Rohatyn, represents Judy Chicago. The work received accolades in both the New York Times and ARTnews art reviews. In ARTnews, Andrew Russeth writes, "Probably the biggest surprise of the fair for me, literally and figuratively: Judy Chicago's Earth Birth, 1983. This beauty is 6 feet tall and 11 feet long, and it explodes off the wall while also sucking you in. It was at the booth of Salon 94, which is now showing Chicago." Image courtesy of Salon 94, New York
Frieze week in London: Judy Chicago was interviewed by curator, critic, and art historian, Hans Ulrich Obrist, for the Transformation Marathon.
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Curated by renowned feminist curator Xabier Arakistain and drawing from works across Chicago’s career, this exhibition both celebrates Chicago's oeuvre and challenges the ongoing institutional resistance to her work. The exhibition opened at Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao, Spain, and is currently on view at the CAPC musée d'art contemporain in Bordeaux, France, through September 4th, 2016!
This groundbreaking reassessment of Pop Art surveyed global engagements with Pop, its origins and its socio-political underpinnings. The exhibition brought together three of Chicago’s seminal Car Hoods.
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"I want to translate particular experiences into universal observations" -- Judy Chicago
Chicago's series Heads Up includes watercolors, sketches, two-dimensional painted glass and three-dimensional cast glass and ceramic heads. Chicago worked on the series from 2007 - 2013, and the work debuted at David Richard Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2014.
To celebrate her seventy-fifth birthday, Judy Chicago drew inspiration from her earliest explorations of feminist imagery to create a monumental pyrotechnic performance piece, A Butterfly for Brooklyn, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park on April 26th, 2014. The site-specific work measuring approximately 200 feet wide by 180 feet high levitated and swirled before 12,000 viewers. Presented by the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum in partnership with Prospect Park Alliance, with major funding from Barbara and Eric Dobkin, the project was an outdoor component of the exhibition Chicago in L. A.: Judy Chicago’s Early Work, 1962-1974 at the Sackler Center at the Brooklyn Museum.
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Judy Chicago was actively involved in Pacific Standard Time, a Getty funded initiative involving almost every institution from Santa Barbara to San Diego, documenting and celebrating Southern California art from 1945-1980, more than 20 of which years, Chicago was working in Los Angeles. Chicago’s work was exhibited in eight museum shows (including the Getty, LAMOCA, Otis Art Institute, the Pomona College Art Museum and the Pasadena Museum of California Art). Chicago kicked off the Getty PST Performance Festival with the restaging of two events, Sublime Environment (a dry ice installation) and A Butterfly for Brooklyn, the first fireworks piece Chicago created since 1974.
Penn State University acquired Judy Chicago's art education archive, now housed in the University Archives in the Special Collections Library on campus, as well as online. The Judy Chicago Art Education Collection is a living archive on feminist art education.
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Written by Judy Chicago with art historian Frances Borzello, Face to Face: Frida Kahlo has handpicked a selection of Kahlo's work, a hundred portraits that speak to the full spectrum of women's experience. The result is a fascinating conversation between two artistic icons.
Through the Flower made available The Dinner Party curriculum aimed at K-12 school teachers, created by Chicago in collaboration with Dr. Constance Gee, a well-known art educator, who brought together a select group of curriculum writers. A summer workshop program to train art teachers in The Dinner Party curriculum is offered at Kutztown University.
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The Dinner Party opened in its new permanent housing at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum in a specially designed exhibition space, created along with an educational database, ancillary exhibitions and programs. Also, in conjunction with the opening of the Sackler Center and The Dinner Party, Global Feminisms opened at the museum, an exhibition curated by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, the renowned art historian. This exhibit demonstrated the global impact of the Feminist Art Movement that Chicago helped initiate in the early seventies when she went to Fresno to create a Feminist Art Practice.
WACK: Art and the Feminist Revolution, curated by Connie Butler, opened at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and later traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts. This was the first major survey of Feminist art, chronicling the revolutionary art movement that ushered in a historic change, i.e. the first time women were able to openly work out of their experiences as women.
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Chicago in Glass opened at LewAllen Contemporary in Santa Fe, a survey of Chicago’s two and three dimensional work in stained glass, fused, cast, etched and painted glass. Chicago explored this new media and transformed a challenging technique into a vehicle for personal expression. She continues to work in glass, particularly cast and kiln fired glass painting.
Chicago premiered KittyCity: A Feline Book of Hours, a series of watercolors that were also collected in a lavishly illustrated book based upon a traditional Book of Hours but in this instance, chronicling a day in the life of the Chicago/Woodman’s household, which was home to six cats. In conjunction with the publication of the book and exhibitions around the country, Chicago worked with animal rescue agencies around the country to do cat adoptions.
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Chicago returned to teaching, doing semester long project classes, that culminated in exhibitions, at institutions around the country, including: Indiana University, Bloomington, IN; Duke University, Durham, NC; Western Kentucky University Bowling Green, KY; Cal-Poly, Pomona, CA; and Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. Several films were made about her unique teaching methods which had their roots in the Feminist art programs of the 1970’s. In 2001, she began team-teaching with Donald Woodman, which allowed her to extend her feminist-based pedagogy to include men.
Chicago and Woodman moved into the Belen Hotel in Belen, New Mexico, a historic railroad hotel on the National Register of Historic Places, after a three-year renovation/restoration by Woodman. This is the first home of their own either of them has ever had.
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Judy Chicago published the second volume of her autobiography, which unabashedly probes the issues of gender, power and history that also characterize her monumental works, and asks hard questions about art in our culture.
From 1994 to 2000, Chicago created a series of painted and needleworked images re-interpreting traditional proverbs for a multi-cultural future with a select group of needleworkers in the project Resolutions: A Stitch in Time. Described by renowned British art writer Edward Lucie-Smith in his 1999 monograph, Judy Chicago: An American Vision, as a “post-modern project that subverts the traditions of both needlework and proverbs.” The exhibition was curated by David Revere McFadden, senior curator at the Museum of Art and Design in NY, where it premiered in 2000, subsequently traveling to museums in the U.S. and Canada.
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Through the Flower moved from Benicia, California, to New Mexico, starting a series of public programs and art workshops. It is headquartered in Belen, New Mexico. Currently, Through the Flower has refocused its activities so that it can fulfill its mission to educate a broad public about the importance of art and its power in countering the erasure of women’s achievements through providing resource and research materials through our institutional partners.
From 1985 -1993, Judy Chicago and Donald Woodman worked on the Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light, a journey into the darkness of the Holocaust which resulted in an exhibition that combined painting and photography to explore the meaning of the Holocaust in a contemporary context. It is introduced by a monumental tapestry suggesting that the Holocaust grew out of the ‘fabric’ of Western Civilization and concludes with a large stained glass installation, Rainbow Shabbat: A Vision for the Future.
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After a whirlwind romance, Judy Chicago and photographer Donald Woodman married. Their wedding was officiated by a female rabbi, and they explored Jewish tradition together and learned about their Jewish heritage. Judy Chicago's Merger Poem was sung at the ceremony.
Chicago settled in Benicia, California, to start the Birth Project (1980-85), a series of painted and needle-worked images celebrating creation and the glory and pain of the birth experience, the joy and challenges of pregnancy and the sense of entrapment that often accompanies the satisfaction of giving life. Mary Ross coordinated the collaborative effort over the five years it took to create. Through the Flower moved into an 11,000-square-foot building in Benicia’s industrial park. Unlike The Dinner Party (1974-79), where needleworkers gathered at Chicago's studio, Birth Project volunteers worked at home, periodically visiting Benicia for reviews. Chicago also traveled around the country, visiting the volunteers to review their work at their homes.
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The Dinner Party (1974-79) opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with the support of Museum Director Henry Hopkins. Feminist programs and activities accompanied the opening, marking the first time a mainstream museum opened its doors to feminist culture. Opening night drew 5,000 people; more than 100,000 people viewed the work during its three-month run. For the most part, the art press was outraged by the butterfly/vagina imagery but that was lost in the avalanche of popular media. In 1980, The Dinner Party re-opened at the Clearlake campus of the University of Houston, thanks to the efforts of Mary Ross Taylor who became the administrator of Chicago's nonprofit, Through the Flower. Under the guidance of exhibit administrator Diane Gelon, The Dinner Party began an unprecedented, grassroots-fueled worldwide tour to six countries, three continents and was seen by more than one million people.
In 1978, Chicago established Through the Flower, a 501(c) non-profit corporation to manage the avalanche of small donations supporting The Dinner Party’s completion. Its original mission of providing a fiscal structure for donations to help complete The Dinner Party quickly evolved, and soon Through the Flower began to organize the worldwide exhibition tour that brought The Dinner Party to sixteen venues in six countries and three continents to over one million viewers. Through the Flower has supported numerous projects since its inception. Through the Flower's mission is to educate a broad public about the importance of art and its power in countering the erasure of women’s achievements.
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Doubleday published Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist in March. It subsequently was published in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Japan and Taiwan.
Chicago firmed up her vision of The Dinner Party (1974-79), a symbolic history of women in Western civilization, as a triangular shaped table with 39 place settings, 13 plates to a side, and spanning time from the mythical Primordial Goddess to women in Twentieth Century.
Chicago stopped teaching to work on The Dinner Party (1974-79). She conceived of the work as a reinterpretation of The Last Supper from “the point of view of those who’ve done the cooking throughout history." Her butterfly motif images would rise off the plates, symbolizing women’s struggle for freedom.
Hundreds of volunteers joined The Dinner Party production crew. All total, 400 men and women worked on the installation, from needleworkers to industrial designers, as well as 20 researchers who helped compile the 999 names on the Heritage Floor.
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Chicago created A Butterfly for Oakland out of 200 road flares outlining a butterfly, to be lit at sunset. A Butterfly for Oakland shimmered for 17 minutes on the shore of Lake Merritt as part of a "Sculpture in the City" project by the Oakland Museum.
Chicago collaborated with art historian Arlene Raven and designer Sheila de Bretteville to open the Feminist Studio Workshop and Woman’s Building, a public center for women's culture, in Los Angeles in 1973. Five-thousand people came to the opening. Judy Chicago, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and Arlene Raven are pictured.
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Chicago moved the Feminist Art Program to the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) and began team teaching with Miriam Schapiro. The 21 women in the program renovated a dilapidated old house at 553 Mariposa Avenue in Hollywood. They worked non-stop for three months, repairing the house as well as creating their revolutionary installations. Womanhouse is the first openly female-centered art installation in contemporary art, and attracted wide media publicity as well as more than 10,000 people during its one-month run.
In the spring, Chicago joined the faculty at Fresno State College to teach a women’s-only art program. She encouraged her students to communicate their experiences as women through their art, a ground-breaking and radical idea at the time. With hammers, saws and power tools in hand, the women renovated an old community theater into a 5,000-square-foot studio of their own. In 1971, Chicago wrote in her personal journal about her content-based approach to teaching art: “I want to begin to establish regular contact with the growth of the first Feminist Art ever attempted.” In her entry, she renamed her course the “Feminist Art Program.”
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In December, Artforum ran a full-page ad of Chicago posing like a pugilist in a boxing ring. The Fullerton show debuted Chicago's large, donut-shaped Pasadena Lifesavers, a series of 15 sprayed acrylic lacquer paintings on Plexiglas. Photograph by Jerry McMillan.
Gerowitz (Chicago) legally changed her name, which she announced in an ad for her solo show at Cal State Fullerton in the October Artforum magazine: “Judy Gerowitz hereby divests herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance and freely chooses her own name: Judy Chicago."
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