Venice Biennale Portraits: Judy Chicago at Galleria Alberta Pane

Judy Chicago: The art world today is very different from the one I entered in Los Angeles in the 1960’s. Although it was marred by being inhospitable to women (which presented many challenges that I have documented in my autobiographies), it was not market-driven. In fact, there was not much of an art market there, which allowed artists a level of freedom that is almost unimaginable today when dealers pressure their artists to create ‘recognizable products’ instead of meaningful art; when value is measured by auction sales; real art criticism barely exists; and empty, derivative work seems to be everywhere.

As a result, this question seems almost quaint although I am still motivated by a deep need to create art that teaches, inspires and empowers viewers, which has been my goal throughout my career. The fact that I seem to be achieving my aims is demonstrated by first, a recent instagram post about my show in Venice by Beatriz Ruiz, founder of The Glitter Lane; “When looking at Judy Chicago’s work, we are not simply looking at another…artist. We are witnessing something far more rare; a sustained creative life built through discipline, continuity, refinement, ritual, technical mastery, and quiet symbolic force.”

Another example of the impact of my work can be seen in “What If Women Ruled the World?”, an ongoing digital/analog project I am doing with Dmniti, who produce work at the intersection of art and technology. An outgrowth of my 5 year collaboration with Maria Grazia Chiuri and Dior for Chiuri’s 2020 couture show, this project has engaged viewers all over the world, stimulating over 5,000 people in multiple countries to discuss the eleven questions I raised in a series of textile banners that have been turned into an ever-expanding monumental quilt that has toured the world. The global eagerness to participate that Dmniti has encountered is a testament to the deep hunger for meaningful art, art that stimulates discourse and creates hope rather than despair at the tragic state of the world.

JC: When – in the early 1970’s – I set out to create a feminist art practice – my goal was for it to become global which (happily) has happened. At that time, there were many earlier artists whose work could be described as feminist but the term didn’t exist and therefore, their art was mischaracterized as belonging to one or another male-centered art movements (Kathe Kollwitz, Meret Oppenheim, Frida Kahlo, Elizabeth Catlett and Georgia O’Keeffe among many others come to mind).

Even today, feminist art as a major force around the world is ignored or not recognized for what it is; an effort to challenge the patriarchal values that dominate our world, values that are mirrored in the global art world. At the opening of my show at Alberta’s, I was startled to discover how many viewers were familiar with my work but complained that ‘they had NEVER ACTUALLY SEEN IT’, only photographs. The fact that the art world had – for many decades – refused to allow my art to be brought to the worldwide audience I have built demonstrates the way meaningful work is erased in favor of what I described; too much meaningless visual clutter.

JC: Some years ago, a feminist curator named Xabier Arakistain did a large exhibition of my work in Bilbao, Spain, where he is based. At some point, he commented to me that from the beginning of my career, I have attempted to challenge patriarchal values, which I continue to do – and plan to do until the day I die because I think those values are responsible for the terrible state of our world today; the extinction of marvelous species, the imminent collapse of our fragile environment, the deep economic inequality that keeps too many people living at a subsistence level; and the triumph of greed over a shared concern for the public good – also, the insane effort to replace human values with machine technology. So, yes, my work continues to be a form of resistance. There are many other artists who claim this as their intention but one would never know it by looking at their art as any resistance it possesses is coded into an unintelligible visual language.

JC: No, materials are not a language; they are a MEANS. Different media allow different forms of expression which is why I have used so many. Over the course of my long career, I have explored a wide variety of subject matter, each of which often required that I employ a different material. For example, in my early, abstract sprayed acrylic paintings on sheet acrylic, I wanted to fuse color and surface which my choice of material reflected. Then, when I moved on to “The Dinner Party” and decided to represent the women on porcelain plates, I learned china-painting in which one uses a brush. But the color is still fused to the surface of the porcelain through successive firings.

Similarly, I selected a range of needlework techniques, often fused with my painting, for “The Birth Project’ because the subject of birth was then so raw, so shrouded in mystery that I felt that it needed to be softened, which needlework can achieve. For the “Holocaust Project” (an eight year collaboration with my husband, photographer Donald Woodman), I wanted to fuse painting and photography because I wanted to root the images in the historic realities of the Holocaust while ‘painting in’ the human story. In order to achieve this, Donald and I had to ‘invent’ a visual language, something I also had to do for the “Birth Project” because there were then so few known images of birth in Western art which forced me to go to direct experience, something that is unusual in contemporary art.

In the last twenty years, I have been working in various glass techniques as they allow an exploration of fragility, vulnerability and transparency combined with strength, which seem appropriate to the subjects I have been dealing with; mortality, environmental collapse, extinction and the power of the human spirit.

JC: I think my explanation about how different materials allow different forms of expression addresses this question. Each media has potential and it also has limits. Pushing those limits is something that characterizes my practice. For instance, when I was working on the “Birth Project” (1980-85), needlework was a taboo in the art world just like china painting had been a decade earlier. One of the reasons so many needleworkers volunteered to work with me is that their talents often exceeded the limited options they had to express those (they often worked from trivial commercial patterns).

In their work with me, they were encouraged to push the limits of their skills and of the particular technique I had chosen. For example, filet crochet, which is often confined to small doilies, was used for a 22 foot long image of birth and macrame became a means to explore the power of birth instead of a decorative hanging. Unfortunately, when needlework became acceptable in the art world, the level of quality I brought to it was ignored. There is so much fiber work by younger artists that would not get them into the needlework projects I have done because it is of such poor quality, which is a shame because needlework was the high art of the Middle Ages and incredible embroidery is still practiced in some of the couture houses.

When I was working with Dior, I had the opportunity to visit their archives where there are stellar examples of what embroidery can do. I realized then – with a shock – that I had more in common with those traditions than with the poor craft that is acceptable in the art world. But as we all know, I am a maverick through and through.