Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago was raised in a time where people did not believe in women equality. Regardless of this mentality of the society, she was raised in a family who believed in equality and did not inform her that not many people shared this belief. She stated in the LA Weekley, “I was raised in a family that believed in equal rights for women, which was very unusual for that time. The bad news was they never bothered to tell me that not everyone else believed in that, too." While a graduate student in University of Chicago, she worked on minimal abstraction and concentrated largely on abstract with female anatomy, including breasts, belly, and vulva and associating it with sexual and emotional pleasure.

Chicago and Schapiro offered a feminist art program in the California Institute of Arts in Valencia. The studio was restricted to women where they would specific references to their experiences. The women would share their women’s experience of themselves and their bodies as a unity. Women from the feminist art program opened a site-specific installation, including many paintings from female artists, called Womanhouse, in January of 1972.

Schapiro and Chicago urged the form of open, central shapes which identified as “a central core, a vagina, which made me a woman”. Many of their art work included central, petal like images that represented not only the gender difference but to give value to the female anatomy in patriarchal culture. Critics’, in the 1980s, perspective mainly concentrated on the essential biological difference between men and women. Chicago and Schapiro argued that female experience is not only determined biologically but culturally and socially shaped.

One of Chicago’s largest accomplishments is The Dinner Party, an installation artwork that consist of 1,038 female artists and 39 place settings. The image above is from the Virginia Woolf place setting. The significance of this masterpiece was to promote social chance by give attention to the productions of women which was a symbol of their expression. This started the controversy of whether female experience is actually produced rather than biological.  

Judy Chicago had a great, lasting influence on many female and artists. Artists’, such as Joan Snyder, art work was influenced by Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro’s work. Chicago’s perspective expanded the mentality of many people in the 20^th century toward women. Chicago celebrated and acknowledged the power and dignity of women and their fertility, something that was undermined in that time. She is an iconic legend for all female artists.

Works Cited

Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 2007. Print.

"Exhibitions: The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago." Brooklyn Museum: The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Apr. 2015.

"Judy Chicago Biography Women's Rights Activist, Artist, Educator, Journalist." Bio.com. A&E Networks Television, n.d. Web. 07 Apr. 2015.