By 1985, when Chicago met and married photographer
Donald Woodman, who shared her Eastern European Jewish
heritage, she was already exploring her Jewish identity and
considering a major project dealing with the Holocaust.
Woodman became her collaborator on both the research and
the execution of the project, finished in 1993. In daring to
represent imagined scenes from the Holocaust, Chicago and
Woodman agree with those, including the Israeli scholar
Adi Ophir, who believe that it is necessary to “concretize the
horror. Honor its intricate details.” Rather than serve as
a memorial, this approach seeks to educate the public.
In
Double Jeopardy
,
Chicago and Woodman presented the
story of the Holocaust as usually recounted, using familiar
photographs as illustration. Chicago then painted in what she
considered “the untold story of women’s experiences of those
same events.”
Arbeit Macht Frei/Work Markes Who Free?
is an
examination of race, class, and oppression in terms of Nazi
slave labor and takes up the history of African-American
slavery in the United States (illustration on page 10).
Chicago’s decision to close the Holocaust Project with the
hopeful vision expressed in
Rainbow Shabbat
is controver-
sial for some, but for others it stands in opposition to the
writer and survivor Primo Levi’s suicide (illustrationon
page 5 and back cover).
Chicago produced
Everybody Was Going to See Who She Really
Was
on October 4, 1993, as part of a suite of drawings she
called
Autobiography of a Year.
In this self-portrait, she depicts
herself stripped bare, nude, with a Jewish star visible on her
chest, from which she is bleeding, a mark of the emotional
anguish she felt at revealing herself. To make absolutely certain
that the viewer got her message, she had written the work’s
title across her legs and the words “woman” and “Jew” above
her right and left arms. The event that prompted this draw-
ing was her anxiety over the impending debut of the
Holo-
caust Project
at the Spertus Museum of Judaica in Chicago.
Resistance
,
study for
Double Jeopardy
,
Holocaust Project
© Judy Chicago, 1990. Prismacolor on rag paper, 29 ¾” x 22”.
Photo © Donald Woodman. Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
Everyone Was Going to See Who She Really Was,
from
Autobiography of A Year
© Judy Chicago, Oct. 4
th
, 1993.
Mixed media on Magnani Paper, 15” x 11”.
Photo © Donald Woodman. Collection: Artist
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