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After six months — which included five trips to Los Angeles where we spent a total of seven weeks, plus a week long trip to Berlin — Pacific Standard Time is finally over for me even though some of the exhibitions are still on view. During this time, I was in eight museum shows in Los Angeles and one in Berlin; had two solo shows in L.A. plus a three person show (also in Berlin); and presented three events — Sublime Environment, the restaging of a 1968 Dry Ice piece at Barker Hanger at the Santa Monica airport; A Butterfly for Pomona, which filled the football field of Pomona College in Claremont; and The Deflowering of Nye + Brown, an entirely new fireworks piece for the opening of my solo show at that gallery. In addition, I did a number of lectures and panels along with dozens of interviews with media from the U.S., the UK, France, Germany and Italy. 
Sublime Environment
A Butterfly for Pomona 
The Deflowering of Nye+Brown 
Judy Chicago and Mark Van Proyen in conversation at the Crocker Museum in conjunction with the exhibition "Surveying Judy Chicago: 1970-2010," March 10, 2012 One of the results of all this exposure is that finally, other aspects of my oeuvre are emerging from the shadow of The Dinner Party. Don’t get me wrong; I am very grateful for the attention The Dinner Party has brought me, but only a small portion of my overall career is well known. Fortunately this seems to be changing, in large part because of PST, which has highlighted not only my early work but also, my fireworks and performance pieces, which few people knew anything about. 
Artists' Panel at Martin-Gropius-Bau, March 15, 2012 Left to right: DeWain Valentine, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, John Mason, Larry Bell, Rani Singh, Judy Chicago, Ed Moses Even though my life will slow down now, the rest of the year still promises to be quite busy. April marks the fifth anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum (where The Dinner Party is permanently housed). To celebrate, the museum is celebrating women artists and honoring Dr. Elizabeth Sackler at its annual Brooklyn Artists Ball. Elizabeth will be the recipient of the Augustus Graham Medal recognizing exceptional patronage of the arts and outstanding contributions to the museum, which she justly deserves. Preceding the Ball, Elizabeth will inaugurate the annual Sackler Center First Awards, honoring fifteen women who are first in their fields with a special etched and gilded glass award based upon the Millennium Triangle Runner from The Dinner Party, which I designed. 
Judy Chicago, Gloria Steinem and Dr. Elizabeth A. Sackler. Steinem and Sackler presented the Sackler Center First Awards on April 18, 2012. 
Pattern for Millennium Triangle Runner from The Dinner Party In July, David Richard Gallery in Santa Fe will host “ReViewing PowerPlay,” a series of work created in the 1980's examining the construct of masculinity. When I began this series, I went to the library to research gender; the only material available then was entirely focused on women, as if only women have gender. It would be another decade before Women’s Studies evolved into Gender Studies and Queer Studies emerged, which created a new context for PowerPlay. I am thrilled that the catalog essay will be written by Dr. Jonathan Katz, director of the Visual Studies Doctoral Program at SUNY Buffalo, president of the Board of Directors of the Leslie/Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York, and co-curator of the recent (and controversial) exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," which premiered at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., where it created quite a stir. 
Driving the World to Destruction In conjunction with the PowerPlay exhibition, Jonathan and I will hold a public conversation on Saturday, July 7th, at 3PM at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe. When Jonathan and I first discussed the possibility of his writing for the catalog (because, as I told him, he was the perfect person for the job), he told me that even though he thought he was familiar with my work, he knew nothing at all about PowerPlay. When he perused the material, he commented that the series seemed both prescient and powerful, perhaps because it anticipated some of the theories about performing masculinity that would emerge from queer studies. It was interesting to think back about the antics of my male peers in the male-dominated Los Angeles art scene of the 1960's and realize that this is precisely what they were doing, i.e., performing their socialized notions about how a man should act. 
Excerpted from Joe Goode's "Calendar pages," 1969–70, "Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art 1945-1980," ed. by Rebecca Peabody, Andrew Perchuk, Glenn Phillips, and Rani Sing. The Getty Research Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011. Meanwhile, Through the Flower has been busy in its new role as a resource center. In February, Helen Knowles, the curator of Birth Rites Collection in Manchester, England, picked up the two Birth Project pieces that (as discussed in the last Chicago Corner) we gifted them. She also interviewed me which, according to her follow up e-mail, really opened her eyes to my long career and more importantly, the context behind the Birth Project, i.e., the natural childbirth movement that was active in the Bay area when I was at work on the project, the appalling absence of images of birth in Western art and the challenges faced by the needleworkers as they tried to wrest sufficient work time from the multiple (and often conflicting) demands on women’s lives. 
Helen Knowles interviewing Judy Chicago, February 4, 2012 Photo courtesy of Helen Knowles The Birth Project work arrived safely and is now being framed. In June, Birth Rites will be holding a series of tours of their collection and in 2013, they will be highlighting the Birth Project works in an exhibition at another gallery in Manchester. Also, in February, I did a Skype conversation with students in Dr. Viki Thompson Wylder’s class at Florida State University in Tallahassee. The class (which is about my work) is titled “The Feminist Gift of Judy Chicago: Beating the Odds from Anonymity to International Reputation.” The students prepared a series of questions that led to a lively conversation. 
The Crowning (Quilt 5 of 9) from Birth Project Additionally, they contacted Ginger Mercer, Administrative Director of TTF, about the Birth Project, which Viki had assigned them to research in conjunction with “Thread of Life,” an exhibition co-curated by Viki at the university’s museum. All of the Birth Project work in their collection is on view as part of this show and Viki asked her students to research some of the other works in the project. Ginger has spent a considerable amount of time in the last two months answering their questions, sending out additional images and providing information to a group of very appreciative students. 
Click to view The Dinner Party Curriculum Project Website Everything is moving along for this summer’s annual Dinner Party Institute at Kutztown University which will once again be co-sponsored by the NAEA (National Art Education Association). The Dinner Party Curriculum Project team (headed by Dr. Marilyn Stewart) held three exciting sessions at this year’s NAEA meeting, one of which involved members of the Brooklyn Museum’s education staff. In fact, for the first time, the Minx Auerbach Award ceremony (for the best application of The Dinner Party curriculum) will be held at the Brooklyn Museum after the all-day exploration of The Dinner Party (with my regular private tour) that is part of the DP Institute. Click here for more information about the exciting, week-long workshop offered by Marilyn Stewart and her colleagues. 
Participants at work in the computer lab at Kutztown University during Dinner Party Institute exploring The Dinner Party Curriculum site. We continue to receive e-mails from teachers who want to use The Dinner Party in their classrooms, which is wonderful; however some of these teachers develop their own curriculum instead of availing themselves of the opportunity of building on the curriculum that we developed by learning about it and even better, by attending the Institute. One of the reasons that we work with Kutztown University and Penn State (where my art education archive is housed and The DP Curriculum is available on-line) is because The DP recounts the recurrent repetition of ideas in women’s history, a repetition that is an inevitable outcome of the institutional failure to integrate women’s achievements and our long struggle for equity into the core curriculum of our schools. TTF’s partnership with these two institutions is an effort to counter this lack so that teachers can benefit from what has already been done and is being expanded (and reported on) by the many teachers who are now using The DP Curriculum. Click here for Judy Chicago Art Education Archive at PSU. Lastly, please note the Save the Date information (in the right hand column) information about this year’s exciting fundraising event in July to be held in conjunction with my PowerPlay show in Santa Fe. Last year’s Celebration Sunday was a huge success so you won’t want to miss out. Stay tuned. 
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Get Out Your Calendars 2012
LA Raw: Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles, 1945-1980 January 22, 2012 – May 20, 2012 Pasadena Museum of California Art Surveying Judy Chicago: 1970-2010 March 3, 2012 – May 13, 2012 Crocker Art Museum Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A.; 1950-1980 March 15, 2012 – June 10, 2012 Martin-Gropius-Bau Museum 
LA Invasion March 16, 2012 – April 30, 2012 The Gas Station Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 May 27, 2012 – August 20, 2012 The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA October 12, 2012 – January 20, 2013 Haus der Kunst ReViewing PowerPlay June 29, 2012 – August 11, 2012 David Richard Gallery With a catalog essay by Dr. Jonathan Katz, Director of Visual Studies Doctoral Program, University of Buffalo, The State University of New York and President of the Board of Directors of the Leslie/Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York, NY. Support Through the Flower You can help us continue TTF's mission of educating a broad public about the importance of art and its power in countering the erasure of women’s achievements. Join or renew your membership in TTF today, or visit our TTF shop. And be sure to watch for more news about our July 7th fundraiser in Santa Fe.
Your support is very important to us.
Judy Chicago and ARTstor
Some time ago, I was contacted by Dr. Hilary Braysmith, an art historian who teaches at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville IN, who is an old friend of Donald’s and mine. She was distressed because her university had gone over to a system of acquiring images through an organization called ARTstor which had very few images of my work in their image bank. At that time, a young art history student named Nancy Thebaut, was interning with us and she took it upon herself to contact ARTstor and offer to work with them to provide a broad range of images across my career. In 2010, ARTstor announced the availability of over 350 images of my work and recently, they sent a report about the usage, which they stated was “fantastic and among the strongest for a collection dedicated to a single…artist”. Apparently, there have been 14,279 requests with 100% of the images saved and users are not only looking at the breadth of my collection but also viewing each image repeatedly. The report concludes that: “This is further evidence that (my) images… are being used in classrooms for teaching because (their) users only take the step of saving images… if they are intending to revisit them later for teaching and research uses.” I have to admit that I had not really thought much about how educators get images for their classrooms but it turns out that this is another area in which women artists are not well represented. Therefore, even for art and art history teachers who wish to integrate more women into their curriculum, the images may not be available. So kudos to Hilary for alerting us and to Nancy for helping to expand art history.
Save the Date
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Unless otherwise noted, all photos (or images) by Donald Woodman. |
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