Judy Chicago facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Judy Chicago
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Judith Sylvia Cohen
July 20, 1939 Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
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| Alma mater | University of California, Los Angeles |
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Notable work
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| Awards | Tamarind Fellowship (1972), Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" (2018), Visionary Woman award from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2019) |
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Judy Chicago (born Judith Sylvia Cohen; July 20, 1939) is an American artist, teacher, and writer. She is famous for her large art projects that often involve many people working together. Her art explores the role of women throughout history and in culture.
In the 1970s, Judy Chicago started the first art program in the United States focused on women's art. This program helped kickstart the feminist art movement. Her work has been shown and written about all over the world. She uses many different art skills, from needlework to welding and fireworks. Her most famous artwork is The Dinner Party. It celebrates the achievements of women throughout history. This artwork is now permanently displayed at the Brooklyn Museum.
Contents
Early Life and Family
Judy Chicago was born Judith Sylvia Cohen in 1939 in Chicago, Illinois. Her father, Arthur, came from a long line of religious leaders. But he chose a different path. He became a labor organizer, which means he helped workers get fair treatment. He also believed in Marxism, a way of thinking about society and economics.
Arthur worked at night and took care of Judy during the day. Her mother, May, was a former dancer and worked as a medical secretary. Judy's father was part of the American Communist Party. His ideas about women's rights and supporting workers greatly influenced Judy.
In the 1950s, during a time called McCarthyism, her father was investigated by the government. This made it hard for him to find work and caused stress for the family. When Judy was six, an FBI agent even questioned her about her father. Her father's health got worse, and he died in 1953. Her mother didn't talk about his death, which made it hard for Judy to cope.
Judy's mother loved art and shared this passion with her children. Judy started drawing at age three and took classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. By age five, she knew she wanted to be an artist. She later attended UCLA on a scholarship.
Education and Early Art
At UCLA, Judy became involved in politics. She designed posters for the UCLA NAACP chapter. She also became a secretary for the group. In 1959, she met Jerry Gerowitz and moved in with him. She had her own art studio for the first time.
Judy married Jerry Gerowitz in 1961. She earned her first art degree in 1962 and her master's degree in 1964. Sadly, Jerry died in a car crash in 1963. This was a very difficult time for Judy.
In 1965, Judy had her first solo art show in Los Angeles. She was one of only four women artists in the show. She later said she didn't want to be labeled as a "Woman, Jewish, or California" artist. She believed that someday, artists wouldn't need such labels.
Judy also experimented with different art forms. She made ice sculptures, which she saw as a symbol for how precious life is. She also created "atmospheres" using fireworks and colored smoke outdoors. These were like performance art pieces.
Around this time, she created the Pasadena Lifesavers series. These were abstract paintings on Plexiglas that blended colors. Judy felt these works were a major turning point in her art.
Changing Her Name
As Judy grew as an artist, she felt less connected to her birth name, Cohen, and her married name, Gerowitz. She wanted a name that wasn't linked to a man by marriage or family history.
A gallery owner nicknamed her "Judy Chicago" because of her strong personality and Chicago accent. She decided this would be her new name. When she legally changed her name, she was surprised that her new husband's approval was needed. To celebrate her new independence, she posed for an exhibition invitation dressed as a boxer. She also put up a banner at her 1970 art show that said she was choosing her own name, Judy Chicago.
Career Highlights
1970s Art and Teaching
Judy Chicago is known as one of the "first-generation feminist artists." These artists helped start the feminist art movement in the early 1970s.
In 1970, Judy began teaching at Fresno State College. She wanted to teach women how to express their female experiences in their art. She started the first women's art class in the U.S. It grew into the Feminist Art Program. Fifteen students worked with Judy in an off-campus studio. They created art, read, and discussed their lives. This helped them make art from their own experiences.
Later, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro started another Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts. Judy also helped co-found the Los Angeles Woman's Building in 1973. This was an art school and exhibition space for women. They wanted to create a new kind of art and art community based on women's lives and feelings.
Judy's first book, Through the Flower (1975), shared her journey to find her identity as a woman artist.
Womanhouse
Womanhouse was a big art project by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro in 1972. They chose 21 female students to work on it. The idea came from talking about how women were traditionally linked to the home. They wanted to show the real experiences of women inside their homes.
Judy believed that female students often held back in art because they weren't used to tools or seeing themselves as working artists. The goal of Womanhouse was to help women become stronger artists and create art from their own lives.
The Dinner Party
Inspired by her studies, Judy Chicago created her most famous work, The Dinner Party. It took her five years and many volunteers to complete. The artwork is a large triangular dining table. It has 39 place settings, each honoring a famous woman from history or myth. These women include artists, goddesses, and activists. Each place setting has a special embroidered table runner. The names of hundreds more women are written on the "Heritage Floor" beneath the table.
Over 400 people, mostly women, volunteered to help with the needlework and sculptures. The Dinner Party traveled as an exhibition before finding a permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum. Some art critics didn't like it, but the public loved it. Over a million people saw the artwork as it traveled around the world.
Birth Project and PowerPlay
From 1980 to 1985, Judy created the Birth Project. This artwork used images of childbirth to celebrate women's role as mothers. Judy noticed that birth was rarely shown in art. She famously said, "If men could give birth, there would be millions of representations of the crowning."
The project involved 150 needleworkers from different countries. They worked on 100 panels using quilting, macrame, and embroidery. Most pieces from the Birth Project are now at the Albuquerque Museum.
Around the same time, Judy also worked on PowerPlay (1982). This series included large paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Both Birth Project and PowerPlay explored topics rarely seen in Western art.
The Holocaust Project
In the mid-1980s, Judy Chicago started exploring the Holocaust. This was a time of great loss for her, as her brother and mother died. The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light (1985–93) was a collaboration with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman.
They spent eight years creating this piece. They watched documentaries, explored archives, and visited concentration camps and Israel. Judy wanted to use the Holocaust to explore themes like unfairness and human cruelty. She also connected these ideas to other issues like environmentalism and war. This comparison caused some discussion within the Jewish community.
The project includes sixteen large artworks made with different materials like tapestry, stained glass, metal, wood, photography, and painting. It covers 3000 square feet, offering a full experience for viewers. The exhibit ends with a piece showing a Jewish couple at Sabbath. It was first shown in 1993 and much of it is now at the Holocaust Center in Pittsburgh.
Later Works and Recognition
In 1994, Judy started Resolutions: A Stitch in Time, a series that took six years to complete. It was shown at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York.
In 1996, Judy and Donald Woodman moved to Belen, New Mexico. Donald had turned an old hotel into their home.
Judy Chicago has received many awards and honorary degrees. In 2008, she was honored for Women's History Month. In 2011, she performed a firework art piece at Pomona College, where she had performed in the 1960s. She also donated her collection of feminist art materials to Penn State University.
In 2012, Judy had two solo exhibitions in the United Kingdom. She also received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Palm Springs Art Fair. In 2018, Time magazine named her one of the "100 Most Influential People." She said her goal as an artist is to show the female experience as a way to understand universal ideas.
In 2021, she was added to the National Women's Hall of Fame. The De Young Museum in San Francisco held a major exhibition of her work, called Judy Chicago: A Retrospective.
In 2022, Judy worked with Nadya Tolokonnikova on a project called What if Women Ruled the World?. This project used new technology to create a community focused on gender rights. Judy continues to explore new art forms, including working with glass. She believes in taking risks and creating unique art.
Her work is part of the permanent collections of many museums around the world, including The British Museum and The Brooklyn Museum.
Art Style and Collaboration
Judy Chicago was inspired by the "ordinary" woman and traditional women's crafts like textile work. She also taught herself "macho arts" like auto body work, boat building, and pyrotechnics. From auto body work, she learned spray painting techniques. These skills allowed her to use materials like fiberglass and metal in her sculptures. She also learned porcelain painting and stained glass. Photography became more important in her work after she married Donald Woodman. Since 2003, she has also been working with glass.
Collaboration is a big part of Judy's art. Many of her large projects, like Womanhouse, The Dinner Party, The Birth Project, and The Holocaust Project, were created with hundreds of volunteers. These volunteers often had skills in traditional women's arts. Judy always makes sure to recognize her assistants as collaborators.
Through the Flower
In 1978, Judy Chicago started Through the Flower. This is a non-profit organization that promotes feminist art. Its goal is to teach people about the importance of art and how it can highlight women's achievements.
Through the Flower also helps take care of Judy's artworks. It stored The Dinner Party before it found its permanent home. The organization also created a curriculum to teach about feminist art ideas.
Teaching Art
Judy Chicago's teaching style is different from many others. Instead of just focusing on art techniques, she emphasizes the meaning and social importance of art, especially for women. She wanted her students to become artists without giving up what being a woman meant to them.
She developed a teaching method where teachers encourage students to explore their personal experiences and feelings in their art. She calls this "participatory art pedagogy".
The art created in her programs, like the Feminist Art Program and Womanhouse, brought up topics about women's lives that were often not discussed in society or the art world. Many of her students went on to have successful art careers.
Judy's teaching style has three main parts:
- Preparation: Students choose a personal concern and research it.
- Process: Students discuss the materials and content for their art in a group.
- Art-making: Students find materials, sketch, get feedback, and create their art.
In 2022, Judy Chicago and Donald Woodman returned to teaching with Wo/Manhouse 2022 in New Mexico. This project featured 19 artists exploring gender roles and identity in a 1950s-style house.
Books by Judy Chicago
- The Dinner Party: A Symbol of our Heritage. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday (1979). ISBN: 0-385-14567-5.
- with Susan Hill. Embroidering Our Heritage: The Dinner Party Needlework. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday (1980). ISBN: 0-385-14569-1.
- The Birth Project. New York: Doubleday (1985). ISBN: 0-385-18710-6.
- Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist. New York: Penguin (1997). ISBN: 0-14-023297-4.
- Kitty City: A Feline Book of Hours. New York: Harper Design (2005). ISBN: 0-06-059581-7.
- Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist. Lincoln: Authors Choice Press (2006). ISBN: 0-595-38046-8.
- with Frances Borzello. Frida Kahlo: Face to Face. New York: Prestel USA (2010). ISBN: 3-7913-4360-2.
- Institutional Time: A Critique of Studio Art Education. New York: The Monacelli Press (2014). ISBN: 9781580933667.
- The Flowering: The Autobiography of Judy Chicago. Thames & Hudson USA (2021). ISBN: 0500094381
See Also
In Spanish: Judy Chicago para niños
