The two series reveal a different side to Chicago’s practice, more personal and raw “My Accident” includes photographs of the couple’s home and a portrait of them in bed. The latter project narrates the accident that occurred three weeks after the couple married, when Chicago was hit by a pickup truck while out running. The BALTIC show includes a little-known collection of “very personal, very unknown” drawings, titled “Autobiography of a Year” (1993–94) as well as Chicago’s first collaboration with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, titled “My Accident” (1986). With the BALTIC survey, the general public will gain an extensive overview of Chicago and just how prolific she has been. The work features prominently in the current touring exhibition “Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance - Act 3,” now showing at the Arnolfini in Bristol. Elsewhere in the U.K., there’s been interest in Chicago’s lesser-known works, such as Immolation IV (1972), which shows the artist Faith Wilding painted green and shrouded in pink smoke in the desert. This month, the first major survey of Chicago’s work in the United Kingdom opens at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle. While she remains a devoted “feminist spokesperson,” Chicago would, she told me frankly, “much rather talk about work.” “It is another form of discrimination against women artists that the art world doesn’t let the fullness of our production to come into the world,” she said.Ĭhicago has, in fact, been at the forefront of many major art movements and the aesthetics that were forged in California in the 1960s and ’70s-from Pop art to Minimalism and Light and Space from body art to installation art-though she was never accepted by them. Yet support came from feminist writers like Lucy Lippard, who referred to the work’s “intricate detail and hidden meanings.” Lippard’s observations of The Dinner Party could apply to Chicago’s oeuvre as a whole: It is full of meanings that are yet to be revealed, and there is a lot we still have to learn about the indefatigable artist, who turned 80 this year. This initial critical reception is telling of how Chicago’s practice has been pigeonholed as purely feminist. Initially, The Dinner Party was dismissed by some critics, including Hilton Kramer, who called it “crass” and “very bad art” in the New York Times in October 1980 and Robert Hughes, who deemed it “cliché” in Time magazine that same year. “I was happy for all the attention, but at the same time, for decades, it’s completely blocked out the rest of my body of work,” Chicago said. After working on it for five years, doing 17-hour days in the studio, the installation went on a world tour and was seen by millions of people, before taking up permanent residence at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007. Yet that may be changing as more exhibitions are focusing on Chicago’s multifaceted practice, and in 2020, the artist will unveil her first-ever retrospective, at San Francisco’s de Young Museum.Ĭhicago is by no means ungrateful for the way The Dinner Party took off. In the past six decades, critical ideas about the artist, she says, have been “based on inaccuracy.” Her work has not been explored through a comprehensive, institutional survey exhibition, so it’s been difficult to get a coherent view of her trajectory beyond The Dinner Party. “My goal for many decades has been to come out of the shadow of The Dinner Party,” Chicago recently told me via Skype, speaking from her studio in New Mexico. Chicago first exhibited the installation in 1979, and everything she did before, and has done since, has been eclipsed by it-something the artist admits she’s struggled with. What defines a Judy Chicago work? Until now, the artist’s quintessential piece has been The Dinner Party (1974–79)-one of the most iconic works of the 20th century, and perhaps the most famous feminist artwork of all time.
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