Judy Chicago was born on July 20, 1939, and she became a well-known artist, art educator, and creator of the first feminist art programme in the United States at California State University, Fresno. She is an American feminist artist whose intricate and narrowly focused installations contributed to the women’s liberation movement’s visual presence in the 1970s and beyond. The artist, Judith Sylvia Cohen, was born in Chicago, Illinois, and went to the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Art Institute of Chicago. She began drawing at age five, inspired by her mother, May Cohen, who encouraged her love of the arts.
Judy characterises her previous pieces as minimalist. She worked with pyrotechnics and explosives as performance art, manipulating coloured smoke flashes to create “atmospheres” outside. She debuted as a solo artist at the Rolf Nelson Gallery in Los Angeles. Then, she was one of only four female painters to appear in the Jewish Museum’s inaugural major minimalist exhibition. She made a series of abstract paintings called “Pasadena Lifesavers”, using acrylic paint on Plexiglas to explore her sexuality.
My major things were painting and sculpture. But it’s obvious that I was also interested in that. But by the time of all that work from 1973—Through the Flower, Let It All Hang Out, The Great Ladies—that period represents my first success at fusing the visual and formal language I had developed with my real content.- Chicago
To give the impression that the shapes “turn, dissolve, open, close, vibrate, wiggle,” these works combined colours to depict her realisation that “she was multi-orgasmic.” Her research on women’s sexuality and representation underwent a dramatic sea change after the release of the series.
Chicago’s “The Birth Project” (1980–1985) and “The Holocaust Project” (1985–1993) continue to explore themes related to women’s lives. “The Dinner Party,” her most well-known piece, is permanently displayed in the Brooklyn Museum. The installation consists of a large ceremonial feast on a triangle table, honouring women’s history with sitting arrangements meant for 39 legendary and well-known ladies from mythology. Beneath the triangular table, on the white tile floor, are the gold-inscribed names of nine hundred and nine women.
Judy Chicago and the Feminism
‘Chicago’s fascination with women’s history is one of the defining aspects of her feminism and one of the features that mark her as part of her generational cohort. For Chicago and others coming into feminist consciousness in the late 1960s, the pressing need for a usable women-centred past enlisted history as an element of their political practice. Feminists in the early 1970s also focused on women’s daily resistance practices and renewal strategies. For Chicago, this focus on “ordinary” women would eventually translate into her attention to needlepoint, china painting, and other art forms dismissed by the art world as “craft” in The Dinner Party. But in 1970, women’s history, which she was most interested in writing, was what she called “female art history.” This would involve an intense focus on the female body’, writes Jane Gerhard.
Chicago utilised her courses, which included both men and women, as testing grounds for her feminism during her first teaching term. She declared, for instance, that “only the women talk; none of the men talk” in one of her classes. Some males who thought her views ridiculous and her style harshly booed her. The rate of attrition was high. While some students left school, others vowed to stick with it because they found Chicago challenging and motivating.
There’s no difference between my knowing that I had a destiny as an artist and clear goals as an artist and my wanting to have orgasms. It was actually easier to talk about sex than it was to say, Hey, I’m going make a difference in the world. I was struggling to be taken seriously as an artist, much less have my talent and potential acknowledged.- Chicago
Midway through the 1970s, the realisation of the limitations within heterosocial political groups that had spurred the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s persisted. However, other feminists, notably those in Chicago, saw separation as the solution to those limitations rather than integration. Chicago accepted guys; her actions did not imply this. Instead, she aimed to establish independent, male-free areas where empowered women might unite to build a more just and equal society.
Toward that end, Chicago re-created her studio to be a space where women could encounter the insights of feminism and experience a feminist lifestyle by living and working with other women and where their sense of themselves could be transformed from girlfriends and wives to artists and feminists — goals very similar to those of her classroom. Yet this time, Chicago, not the university, was in charge.
According to Jane Gerhard, ‘Between 1974 and 1979, Chicago mobilized feminist and financial interest in the project by giving public lectures to women’s groups, art groups, and any other venue that would pay her. While touring the country, she sought contacts with people who could help her raise much-needed funds. Later, the publication of her first memoir, Through the Flower, won several converts to her project who were willing to move to California to help her. By the end of 1975, she had a core staff that took on more and more project management.’
So I’m thinking, Oh my God; this is a historic opening, a change, a huge change—women actually telling the truth about what their experiences have been and how they feel, living in a completely sexist world. It was unbelievably radical. And it made me think about the fact that my identity was framed in a way earlier time. I used to direct plays on the back porch of my house in Chicago. But it would have been inconceivable to think, I’m going to become a film director or a theater director. And even wanting to be an artist was already enough. And then I realized, Whoa, I have all these new options.-Chicago
