Tuesday Featured Artist - Judy Chicago

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Judy Chicago, feminist, artist

JUDY CHICAGO, b. 1939

In 1971 Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro jointly founded the CalArts Feminist Art Program for the California Institute of the Arts. Together they organized one of the first-ever feminist art exhibitions - Womanhouse - January 30-February 28, 1972. In 1973, Chicago co-founded the Feminist Studio Workshop, located inside the Los Angeles Women's Building, a seminal feminist art teaching and exhibition space.

Currently, Chicago is married to photographer Donald Woodman and serves as the Artistic Director of Through the Flower, a non-profit arts organization created in 1978 to support her work. The U.S. copyright representative for Judy Chicago and Through the Flower is the Artists Rights Society.^[4] A biography, Becoming Judy Chicago; A Biography of the Artist, by Dr. Gail Levin, was released in February, 2007.

Judy Chicago is an advisory board member of the organization Feminists For Animal Rights.

(Source: Wikepedia) 
Judy Chicago, born Judy Cohen, went to auto body school, boat building school and apprenticed as a pyrotechnician, to prove her abilities in the very macho based pop art world of Los Angeles of the early 1960’s. 

Judy began producing metal and fiberglass sculptures, displaying explicit sexual and feminist imagery. She began teaching at the California Institute for the Arts becoming a leader in the Feminist Art Program. Judy was determined to bring female themes and images to the art world that was dominated by male artists and male historians.  She continued to paint, sculpt, produce craftwork and write; most of her themes continue to revolve around Feminism. 



 

The Dinner Party Installation, first exhibited 1979 Brooklyn Museum





The Dinner Party, an important icon of 1970s feminist art and a milestone in twentieth-century art, is presented as the centerpiece around which the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is organized, at The Brooklyn Museum. The Dinner Party comprises a massive ceremonial banquet, arranged on a triangular table with a total of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating an important woman from history. 

The settings consist of embroidered runners, gold chalices and utensils, and china-painted porcelain plates with raised central motifs that are based on vulvar and butterfly forms and rendered in styles appropriate to the individual women being honored. 

 

Susan B. Anthony plate, Judy Chicago

 

Georgia O'Keefe plate, Judy Chicago

 

Emily Dickenson plate, Judy Chicago

 

Margaret Sanger plate (early birth control activist)

The names of another 999 women are inscribed in gold on the white tile floor below the triangular table. This permanent installation is enhanced by rotating Herstory Gallery exhibitions relating to the 1,038 women honored at the table.



Sojourner Truth plate, Judy Chicago



Virginia Wolfe plate, Judy Chicago



(Source, Brooklyn Museum)


 Her own web site is...
http://www.judychicago.com/

Repost from 

Friday, March 18, 2011

Women working (potters)

For Sepia Saturday this week, the suggestion is a photo of a woman who is assembling boxes (as shown)

Funjoho African potter

I could only show a few women potters, but not in sepia tones.

Some of these women potters really influenced me.  I did a whole month of blogs a few years ago of women artists for Women's History Month, March 2011.  It's already been posted, so I won't copy myself, just give you the links HERE.

Adelaid Alsop Robineau developed new glazes, was a leading ceramic designer, and worked to develop American ceramics in the 19th century.  She's pretty close to the Sepia Saturday posting.

Scarab Vase by Adelaide Alsop Robineau

Robineau and Scarab vase

Maria Martinez of San Isledefonso, New Mexic

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Black on Black Bowl by Maria Martinez

Nan Smith, my clay professor at University of Florida

Nan's photos of her work are all copyrighted, so I am just showing pictures of her (center).

M. C. Richards, author of "Centering, in the Art of Pottery and Person"

I really learned a lot from M.C. Richards.  Here's a post where I featured her a few years ago M. C. Richards and Me.  Actually it tells how I first came to work with pottery.

 

Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago's Dinner Party installation is a collection of dinner places honoring various famous women.  Since 2007 it has been on permanent exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, New York.  I've never seen it in person, but was impressed while studying ceramics, and started making sculptural pieces as a result.

Installation, The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago

From Wikepedia
"The table is triangular and measures 14.63 m (forty-eight feet) on each side. Each place setting features a table runner embroidered with the woman's name and images or symbols relating to her accomplishments, with a napkin, utensils, a glass or goblet, and a plate. Many of the plates feature a butterfly- or flowerlike sculpture as a vulva symbol. A collaborative effort of female and male artisans, The Dinner Party celebrates traditional female accomplishments such as textile arts (weaving, embroidery, sewing) and china painting, which have been framed as craft or domestic art, as opposed to the more culturally valued, male-dominated fine arts.

Virginia Wolf design for place setting, by Judy Chicago

TOSHIKO TAKAEZU

Moonpots by Toshiko Takaezu

Happy Birthday Judy Chicago

 The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago,  in the Brooklyn Museum...in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art

 the cover of the book...

And more info about the Dinner Party...

   The principal component of The Dinner Party is a massive ceremonial banquet arranged in the shape of an open triangle—a symbol of equality—measuring forty-eight feet on each side with a total of thirty-nine place settings. The "guests of honor" commemorated on the table are designated by means of intricately embroidered runners, each executed in a historically specific manner. Upon these are placed, for each setting, a gold ceramic chalice and utensils, a napkin with an embroidered edge, and a fourteen-inch china-painted plate with a central motif based on butterfly and vulvar forms. Each place setting is rendered in a style appropriate to the individual woman being honored.

Wing One of the table begins in prehistory with the Primordial Goddess and continues chronologically with the development of Judaism; it then moves to early Greek societies to the Roman Empire, marking the decline in women's power, signified by Hypatia's place setting. Wing Two represents early Christianity through the Reformation, depicting women who signify early expressions of the fight for equal rights, from Marcella to Anna van Schurman. Wing Three begins with Anne Hutchinson and addresses the American Revolution, Suffragism, and the movement toward women's increased individual creative expression, symbolized at last by Georgia O'Keeffe.

Source: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/home.php

The scope of this ceramic installation is incredible.  I was so shocked when I first saw some of the pictures...then finally saw a book of them.  And then I was so inspired to be a feminist and a ceramic sculptor.

Judy Chicago (American, b. 1939). The Dinner Party (Mary Wollstonecraft and Sojourner Truth place settings), 1974–79. Mixed media: ceramic, porcelain, textile. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation, 2002.10. © Judy Chicago. Photograph by Jook Leung Photography