This year feminist art icon Judy Chicago turns 75 and institutions across the country are taking the opportunity to reexamine the spunky septuagenarian’s legacy. Before her birthday in July, she will have had shows open at the Brooklyn Museum, Jersey City’s Mana Contemporary, D.C.’s National Museum of Women in the Arts, the New Mexico Museum of Art, Penn State’s Palmer Museum of Art, and Harvard’s Schlesinger Library. Since Chicago was included in 2011’s “Pacific Standard Time,” there’s been a revived interest in her work in finish fetish, minimalism, and performance — fields she isn’t usually associated with.
“For many, many years I was very happy about the attention that ‘The Dinner Party’ brought me, but it also blocked out the rest of my work,” Chicago told ARTINFO during a recent interview at a hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “That began to change with ‘Pacific Standard Time’ and since then there’s been interest across my career. There’s not a major museum in the world that would accord enough space to a major retrospective of my work, so I’m having a national retrospective. I’m thrilled. It’s a good birthday present, right?”
In this retrospective year, it’s not just Chicago’s art that deserves more attention. With the publication of her new book, “Institutional Time: A Critique of Studio Art Education,” it’s also the perfect time to look at her life-long dedication to feminist education and mentoring other artists. From the beginning, teaching existed side by side with her art practice.
Chicago is well known as the founder of the first Feminist Art Program at Fresno’s California State University in 1970, which she then moved to CalArts a year later with Miriam Schapiro. With Schapiro she also founded Womanhouse, a collaborative performance space, in 1972. Over the course of her career, Chicago has taught at Indiana University, Duke University, Western Kentucky University, and Vanderbilt University, among other places.
At the recent press preview for her Brooklyn Museum show, “Chicago in L.A.: Judy Chicago’s Early Work, 1963-74,” a group of around 20 journalists gathered for a tour with Chicago and curator Catherine Morris. Before the tour started, Chicago asked everyone to go around and introduce themselves to the group. Clearly her teacherly sensibility extends outside the classroom.
“In the later ’60s, she, as a teacher, was very much aware that her own personal experiences working primarily with male teachers in primarily male studio situations negatively impacted her,” Morris said in a phone interview. “She wanted to think about how she could support other female artists as a teacher. Those things come together to form her pedagogy and her ideas for building an independent studio where women artists could work and discover themselves independent of that external pressure to neutralize their gender if they wanted to be successful.”
One of those students was L.A.-based artist and activist Suzanne Lacy, who earned an MFA from CalArts’s Feminist Art Program in 1973. “Judy was a fabulous teacher,” Lacy said. “She’s very compassionate, connected, and engaged with her students. She takes a deep personal interest in her students’ lives and wellbeing. She understands the mentorship relationship and she has maintained relationships with some of us for years. She influenced my career. I wasn’t going to be an artist. I was going to be a doctor. So her influence led me in the direction of the arts and ultimately creating a career in the arts.”
Chicago’s latest tome is the result of a lifetime of working as a teacher and mentor. “I am arguing in the book for a complete transformation of university curriculum altogether,” Chicago said. Her pedagogical approach is what she calls “content-based.”
“Content is not something that is often discussed in university studio art education classes or art history,” she said. “There’s a very famous story from the ’70s: There was a class at Stanford at the beginning of the women’s movement. This male professor is talking about Rubens’s ‘Rape of the Sabine Women’ and there’s this whispering starting in the class. One of them says to the other, ‘Isn’t that a rape?’ and the voices are getting louder. Finally one woman goes, ‘That’s a fucking rape. Why are you talking about the brushstrokes?’ It’s the perfect example of the kind of absence of focus on content.”
Chicago argues that young artists should first find their content. “I’m advocating that content become part of the focus in helping young people find their own voices,” she said. “The way I teach is that I help people find… their own personal subject matter and then I encourage them and help them find and develop the tools to express that, whether that’s a video or performance or drawing or painting or sculpture.”
Another goal of the book is to advocate that women’s history and the history of the feminist art movement be fully integrated into mainstream university education. “My interest in institutional erasure also prompted me to write ‘Institutional Time,’ because I was getting all these letters from young women who were telling me they were not learning about women’s art and women’s history, except in sort of ghettoized separate small classes, but certainly not in the mainstream of art history or history,” Chicago said. “The job of institutions is to preserve and pass on culture and history in terms of women’s cultural production and the cultural production of other marginalized groups. They are doing a lousy job. They are failing at that job.”
Never one to hold back in speaking her mind, Chicago has been a contentious figure, especially within the feminist community. Art critic and activist Lucy Lippard has been friends with Chicago for 50 years and, together with Schapiro, founded the national feminist network West East Bag in 1971.
“Judy always made it clear that she was a leader (or the leader), while many feminist artists thought the movement should be leaderless and more equally collaborative,” Lippard told ARTINFO in an email. “Some strongly resisted having Judy as their leader because they just didn’t like her work. (That’s allowed.) New Yorkers in particular were on different tracks and resented media lumping everyone in one Chicagoesque category. Judy can be charming and she can be abrasive. She takes no prisoners. She always thought big and dared to stand up against the (mostly male) powers that be, which is why she’s such a role model.”
Role models like Chicago are still needed. According to Lacy, the art world and art education is greatly lacking in mentorship and women teachers supporting women artists. And Chicago, even in her mid-70s, is as active as ever and continues to fight for equality in the classroom and out.
“When I was a grad student, a lot of us were real working class and we suffered economically,” Lacy said. “I was earning a living as a carpenter. Judy and I were standing in her living room talking and I said, ‘I’m flat broke. I just don’t have any money and I don’t know what to do.’ She reached in her pocket and pulled out $20, which was probably like $100 today, but she pulled it out and said, ‘It’s all I got now but here.’ She was that kind of really committed person to her students and to the process of becoming an artist.”
