I
f Judy Chicago didn’t exist, someone would have had
to invent her! This sentiment is voiced by the legion
of people whose lives have been impacted by Judy Chicago
and her art. Chicago, a genuine force of nature, combines
qualities of intelligence, compassion, exasperation, impa-
tience, and proselytizing zeal. Her initial outrage, upon realiz-
ing that women had been systematically ignored, deleted,
marginalized, forgotten, demeaned, manipulated, and blotted
out of history, is a continuing theme in all of her work. Highly
energized, unafraid of controversy, and sharply articulate,
she set out to change things and change them she did.
In her recent book,
Becoming Judy Chicago: A Biography of the
Artist
,
Dr. Gail Levin examines the interweaving of Chicago’s
personal and artistic sensibilities with her Jewish background
and values. This intensely researched volume follows every
thread of the artist’s maturation and creative development,
tying together her manifold interests, passions, and successes.
She is in equal part an artist, author, feminist, educator, and
intellectual, and Dr. Levin addresses each of these aspects,
tracing their interaction to the visual whole.
As a social activist, Chicago clearly saw the inequities of
racism and political slander. During her college years at
UCLA in the late 1950s, she created posters for NAACP
rallies and programs and understood that race discrimination
and gender discrimination stemmed from the same source:
ignorance. However, it is an unbalanced view to see Judy
Chicago solely as a social activist, since much of her work
emerges from the need to address deeper historical inequities.
First and foremost, it is through her art that she has effected
social change. Coming of age as a feminist during the
sexual revolution, her highly charged art caught public
attention. Frequently derided by critics for the
shocking subject matter and easy compartments of
art criticism, Chicago nonetheless became the visual
leader for people awakening to the self-imposed
constraints of their lives. Challenging the ‘male gaze’
of the art world, in which the norm was men look-
ing at women, she promulgated the idea of women
taking pride in their own sexuality.
In 1979, with the introduction of
The Dinner Party
,
the central theme of which extols the physical, fe-
male source of creativity, Chicago started an earth-
quake. Prior to this work, although nude women
were the norm in both painting and sculpture, there
was no sense of organic physicality in the art world.
Women were sculpted in pure, unblemished white
marble, chaste, virginal, smoothly groomed, and
used as objects of suppressed (male) desire or symbols
of unachievable purity. Chicago brought the reality
of tangible, lush, pulsing women’s bodies into the art world.
The very fact that all of humankind, male and female,
emerged from a female vagina, had seemingly not occurred
to most of the art-viewing public. Long accustomed to ad-
miring bare breasts, audiences were shaken to the core by
the flowering of vaginal sculpture.
Chicago had chosen to depict each of the celebrated women
invited to her dinner party by using the very materials and
techniques previously relegated as ‘women’s arts’ by the male
art world; the domestic creativity of needlework, embroidery,
ceramics and painted dinner ware. Her epic works, which she
called ‘Projects,’ all make use of these techniques. They are
multi-image, collaborative works, created over a period of
time and by numerous volunteer artists working to achieve
Chicago’s vision of extending a single concept. Incorporating
many forms of needlework they thus secure their appellation
as ‘feminist’ or ‘women’s art.’
Following
The Dinner Party
in power and impact was the
Birth Project
(1980-1985).
There are very few visual or sculp-
tural images in the western canon of art depicting childbirth.
Christianity hedges the subject by presenting the virgin birth
as an off-stage birthing. The golden rays of eye contact ema-
nating from the Angel of Annunciation to the Virgin are fol-
lowed by the beautiful swelling of her womb and then, the
scene in the manger. The act of childbirth is thus mystified
and traditionally absent from western art. However, all tribal
cultures graphically depict the action of birth and it is this
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Judy Chicago: An Agent of Change
Judy Chicago in her studio.