That fall she began to teach only women in what soon came
to be called the Feminist Art Program. Chicago moved her
program to the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in
Valencia the next academic year so that she could run it
together with her friend, the painter, Miriam Schapiro. The
two led students in producing
Womanhouse,
an early instal-
lation and performance space intended to interrogate the
situation of women. The project attracted more than ten
thousand visitors and national publicity during February
1972
when it was open.
Chicago left CalArts in 1973 to found the Feminist Studio
Workshop with art historian Arlene Raven and graphic designer
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, both of whom, like Schapiro,
shared her working-class Jewish background. To house the
workshop, the three founded the Woman’s Building, which
opened on November 28, 1973. The next year, Chicago pro-
duced and exhibited drawings for a series of lithographs called
CompressedWomenWho Yearned to Be Butterflies,
one of which
focuses on
Mme. Deronda,
who grapples with her genius in
George Eliot’s 1876 novel,
Daniel Deronda,
which features a
family of characters called “Cohen.” On her drawing (illus-
tration on page 6), Chicago transcribed
Mme. Deronda’s
bit-
ter protest: “You are not a woman. You may try – but you
can never imagine what it is to have a man’s force of genius
in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl. To have
a pattern cut out – this is the Jewish woman! This is what
you must be; this is what you are wanted for; a woman’s
heart must be of such size and no larger, else it must be
pressed small, like Chinese feet.”
In March 1975 Chicago published
Through the Flower,
a
widely read manifesto for feminist art and memoir in which
she recalls her childhood and development as an artist, ex-
pressing pride in having been reared in the secular Jewish cul-
ture that figures importantly in the book. She recounts how,
when she was still a small child, her mother’s stories of going
“
to the Jewish People’s Institute,” where she mingled with
“
creative people,” became the context through which May
Cohen encouraged her young daughter’s love of drawing and
nurtured her desire to become an artist.
From 1969 until she divorced in 1979, Chicago was married
to Lloyd Hamrol, a fellow Jew, an artist, and a close friend,
whom she had known since their undergraduate days. This
is the same period during which she conceived and executed
her major work,
The Dinner Party
,
with the help of many,
mainly voluteers. Inspired by images of the Last Supper,
which was, of course, the Passover
seder
,
The Dinner Party
features thirty-nine place settings around a triangular table,
representing women from myth and history of whom only
one is Jewish: Judith of the Hebrew Bible. More Jewish
women, however, figure among the 999 names inscribed on
the porcelain-tiled Heritage floor, from the biblical matri-
archs Rachel and Sarah to Golda Meir and Henrietta Szold
in modern times (illustration on page 2). More importantly,
Chicago made the plates on the third wing rise up physically
“
as a symbol of women’s struggle for freedom,” echoing the
seder
’
s theme of the Jews’ passage from slavery to freedom.
During the early 1980s, Chicago worked on the
Birth Project
,
another engagement with volunteers who executed her
needlework designs. Included were several different rendi-
tions of
Creation
,
which take birth as a metaphor for creation
itself. When an interviewer inquired whether the idea of God
fit into her life, she responded: “Yes. . . . I believe in God.
I believe that . . . I’m part of this whole, large fabric of life
and it’s a miracle and that’s God for me.”
7
|
Creation of the World,
Scroll #6
,
Birth Project
© Judy Chicago, 1981-83; Hand-colored lithograph, 34” x 96”.
Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM