About Judy Chicago

http://www.judychicago.com
Judy Chicago is an artist, author, feminist, educator, and intellectual whose career now spans
four decades. Her influence both within and beyond the art community is attested to by her
inclusion in hundreds of publications throughout the world. Her art has been frequently exhibited
in the United States as well as in Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. In addition,
a number of the books she has authored have been published in foreign editions, bringing her art
and philosophy to thousands of readers worldwide.
In the early seventies after a decade of professional art practice, Chicago pioneered Feminist Art
and art education through a unique program for women at California State University, Fresno, a
pedagogical approach that she has continued to develop over the years. She then brought her
program to Cal-Arts, where she team-taught with Miriam Schapiro, producing with their students
the ground-breaking Womanhouse project. In 2009, California State University, Fresno hosted an
exhibition entitled "A Studio of Their Own: The Legacy of the Fresno Feminist Experiment" in
which the work of the very first Feminist Art program students, with whom Chicago worked
closely, was showcased.
In 1974, Chicago turned her attention to the subject of women's history to create her most well-
known work, The Dinner Party, which was executed between 1974 and 1979 with the
participation of hundreds of volunteers. This monumental multimedia project, a symbolic history
of women in Western Civilization, has been seen by more than one million viewers during its
sixteen exhibitions held at venues spanning six countries.
The Dinner Party has been the subject of countless articles and art history texts and is included
in innumerable publications in diverse fields. The impact of The Dinner Party was examined in
the 1996 exhibition, Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art History. Curated
by Dr. Amelia Jones at the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum, this show was accompanied by an
extensive catalog published by the University of California Press. In 2007,  The Dinner Party was
permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum as the centerpiece of the Elizabeth A. Sackler
Center for Feminist Art, thereby achieving Chicago's long-held goal. In conjunction with the
permanent housing, Chicago published a final updated and departure book about The Dinner
Party: From Creation to Preservation (Merrell, 2007).
From 1980 to 1985, Chicago worked on the Birth Project. Having observed an absence of
iconography about the subject of birth in Western art, Chicago designed a series of birth and
creation images for needlework which were executed under her supervision by 150 skilled
needle workers around the country. The Birth Project, exhibited in more than 100 venues,
employed the collaborative methods and a similar merging of concept and media that
characterized The Dinner Party. Exhibition units from the Birth Project can be seen in numerous
public collections around the country including the Albuquerque Museum where the core
collection of the Birth Project has been placed to be made available for exhibition and study.
While completing the Birth Project, Chicago also focused on individual studio work to
create Powerplay. In this unusual series of drawings, paintings, weavings, cast paper, and
bronze reliefs, Chicago brought a critical feminist gaze to the gender construct of masculinity,
exploring how prevailing definitions of power have affected the world in general - and men in
particular. The thought processes involved in Powerplay, the artist's long concern with issues of
power and powerlessness, and a growing interest in her Jewish heritage led Chicago to her next
body of art.
The Holocaust Project: From Darkness Into Light, which premiered in October 1993 at the
Spertus Museum in Chicago, traveled to museums around the United States until 2002, and
selections from the project continue to be exhibited. TheHolocaust Project involved eight years of
inquiry, travel, study, and artistic creation; it is comprised of a series of images merging
Chicago's painting with the innovative photography of Donald Woodman, as well as works in
stained glass and tapestry designed by Chicago and executed by skilled artisans.
Resolutions: A Stitch in Time was Judy Chicago's last collaborative project. Begun in 1994 with
skilled needle workers with whom she had worked for many years, Resolutions combines
painting and needlework in a series of exquisitely crafted and inspiring images which - with an
eye to the future - playfully reinterpret traditional adages and proverbs. The exhibition opened in
June 2000 at the Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY, and was toured to seven venues
around the United States and Canada.
For many decades, Chicago has produced works on paper, both monumental and intimate.
These were the subject of an extensive retrospective "Trials and Tributes" which opened in early
1999 at the Florida State University Art Museum in Tallahassee, Florida, organized by Dr. Viki
Thompson Wylder, who is a scholar on the subject of Chicago's oeuvre. In October 2002, a
major exhibition surveying Chicago's career was presented at the National Museum of Women in
the Arts. The show was accompanied by a catalog edited by Dr. Elizabeth A. Sackler with essays
by Lucy Lippard and Dr. Viki Thompson Wylder and an Introduction by Edward Lucie-Smith.
In 2009, the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto mounted "If Women Ruled the World," the
first major survey of Chicago's work in the needle and textile arts. This exhibition included
Chicago's monumental textile works and was accompanied by an extensive catalog with essays
by Allyson Mitchell and Jenni Sorkin, both young feminist scholars. The show subsequently
traveled to the Art Gallery of Calgary.
In addition to a life of prodigious art making, Chicago is the author of numerous books: "Through
the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist", 1975 (subsequently published in England,
Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and China); "The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage", 1979;
"Embroidering Our Heritage: The Dinner Party Needlework", 1980 (also published in a combined
edition in Germany); The "Birth Project", 1985 (Anchor/Doubleday); "Holocaust Project: From
Darkness into Light", 1993; "The Dinner Party"/Judy Chicago, 1996; "Beyond the Flower: The
Autobiography of a Feminist Artist", 1996 (Viking Penguin); "Fragments from the Delta of Venus",
2004 (powerhouse Books) and "Kitty City: A Feline Book of Hours", 2005 (Harper Design
International). She published a final book on "The Dinner Party: From Creation to Preservation",
2007 (Merrell Publishers) in conjunction with the permanent housing of this icon of twentieth
century art, now featured in Janson's "A Basic History of Western Art".
In 1999, Chicago published a book (coauthored with Edward Lucie-Smith, the well-known British
art writer) in the U.S., Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand, and Germany. "Women and
Art: Contested Territory" examines images of women by both male and female artists throughout
history. In the spring of 2000, "Judy Chicago: An American Vision", a richly illustrated monograph
about Chicago's career by Edward Lucie-Smith, was published. This book provided the first
comprehensive assessment of Chicago's body of art. In 2010, her book on Frida Kahlo (co-
authored by British art historian, Frances Borzello) will be published by Prestel.
"Fragments From The Delta Of Venus" (powerHouse Books), published in 2004, is a collection of
images based upon the erotic writing of Anais Nin. Also included in the book is an essay by
Chicago about her relationship with Nin who was her mentor in the early seventies. In
conjunction with the book's publication, a number of exhibits were held surveying Chicago's
erotic work created over three decades. For many years, Judy Chicago has been interested in
redressing the iconographic void around women's perspective on sexuality and desire.
Judy Chicago's subsequent book, "Kitty City: A Feline Book of Hours" (Harper Design
International), was based on a series of watercolors chronicling the life and activities of Judy
Chicago, her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, and their bevy of cats. In conjunction
with the publication of the book, exhibitions, book signings and cat adoption were held around
the country. Since 2003, Chicago has been working in fused, etched, cast and painted glass, and
in 2010, she will have four glass exhibitions in both the US and Canada.
In 1999, Chicago returned to teaching for the first time in twenty-five years, having accepted a
succession of one-semester appointments at various institutions around the country beginning
with Indiana University, Bloomington, where she received a Presidential Appointment in Art and
Gender Studies. In 2000, she was an Inter-Institutional Artist in Residence at Duke University
and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In 2001, with her husband, photographer
Donald Woodman, she undertook a project with students at Western Kentucky University.
Working with students, faculty and local artists, Chicago and Woodman developed a project
titled, "At Home", examining the subject of the house from the perspective of residents of
Kentucky who have a keen sense of place and home. In the fall of 2003, Chicago and Woodman
team-taught again, facilitating an ambitious inter-institutional, multi-site project in Pomona and
Claremont, California. In the spring of 2006, Chicago and Woodman were the first Chancellor's
Artists in Residence at Vanderbilt University where they facilitated a project involving Vanderbilt
students and Nashville artists.
Chicago is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including an Honorary Doctorate in Fine
Arts from Russell Sage College in Troy, NY; an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts, honoris causa
from Smith College, Northampton, MA; an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA; an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Duke University,
Durham, NC; the 1999 UCLA Alumni Professional Achievement Award; and a Visionary Woman
Award from Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA in 2004 as well as the Lion of
Judah Award that same year. Many films have been produced about her work including "Right
Out of History; The Making of Judy Chicago's Dinner Party by Johanna Demetrakas;
documentaries on Womanhouse, the Birth Project, the Holocaust Project and Resolutions; and
two films produced by the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, Under Wraps and The Other Side of
the Picture. E Entertainment Television included Judy Chicago in its three-part program, World's
Most Intriguing Women. Recently, she was named one of the Eight Jewish Women Who
Changed the World in the magazine published by the Union for Reform Judaism.
In 1996, the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at
Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA, became the repository for Chicago's papers. Chicago is the
first living artist to be included in this major archive, one being used by scholars researching Judy
Chicago's work, for example, the art historian, Gail Levin, who consulted the Schlesinger
archives for her biography of Judy Chicago, "Becoming Judy Chicago" (Harmony, 2007).
For over five decades, Chicago has remained steadfast in her commitment to the power of art as
a vehicle for intellectual transformation and social change and to women's right to engage in the
highest level of art production. As a result, she has become a symbol for people everywhere,
known and respected as an artist, writer, teacher, and humanist whose work and life are models
for an enlarged definition of art, an expanded role for the artist, and women's right to freedom of
expression.
For more information about Judy Chicago's work, see www.judychicago.com,
www.throughtheflower.org.

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/dinner_party/

The Dinner Party, an important icon of 1970s feminist art and a milestone in twentieth-
century art, is presented as the centerpiece around which the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for
Feminist Art is organized. The Dinner Party comprises a massive ceremonial banquet,
arranged on a triangular table with a total of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating
an important woman from history. The settings consist of embroidered runners, gold chalices
and utensils, and china-painted porcelain plates with raised central motifs that are based on
vulvar and butterfly forms and rendered in styles appropriate to the individual women being
honored. The names of another 999 women are inscribed in gold on the white tile floor below
the triangular table. This permanent installation is enhanced by rotating Herstory Gallery
exhibitions relating to the 1,038 women honored at the table. 

Fiona Hall
http://visualartsnetwork.net.au

"I often work with skins. Skin is defined as a protective layer or membrane that separates an organism
from its surroundings, providing a barrier, shelter or linkage. Skin also acts as an identifier, a casing that
gives a life form particular characteristics, type, uniqueness and description.

There can be a tension operating between the surface layer of skin and the deeper systems of
signification operating beneath.Questions concerning identity are central to skin- personal, national and
racial. Skin is also used to ask questions about the actual as opposed to the perceived state of the
environment.

Skin used in conjunction with scientific equipment speakings of how we now find ourselves capable of
investing the process of evolution with strategic direction into the future.Can we provide the outcomes of
genetic experimentation with purpose and meaning? Are we ready to accept the implications of the
creative abilities we garner through science?"

Linelle Stepto’s practice embraces and reflects her professional studies in Fine Arts at Sydney University
and art at RMIT in Melbourne, exploring the present & future tension between the built and the natural
environment. She has participated in exhibitions in Regional and commercial galleries, and been selected
in major competitions such as the Woollahra Small Sculpture Show, the Churchie and the Prometheus
Award. Linelle has been awarded prizes in the Border Art Prize, the Queensland Regional Art Awards,
ABC Artnest Awards and was selected into the ABC Painting Australia Series (Byron Bay episode).
Currently she is teaching Visual Arts at Murwillumbah TAFE.

http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/fionahall/

Fiona Margaret Hall (b. 1953) is one of Australia's leading contemporary artists. She
first emerged in the 1970s as a photographer, but during the 1980s transitioned to
using a diverse range of art forms. Her ever-growing repertoire includes sculpture,
painting, installation, garden design and video.
Hall's choice of material, and the way she uses it, is critical to her art. It speaks to us
because it engages with contemporary life in intriguing ways, created from an
Australian perspective. Hall deliberately transforms ordinary everyday objects to
address a range of contemporary issues such as globalisation, consumerism,
colonialism and natural history.

The core theme throughout Hall's work is the relationship between nature and
culture. Throughout her career Hall has also maintained a lifelong commitment to
teaching and study as a means of furthering her art.

Hall is arguably best known for her erotic sardine can series, Paradisus Terrestris.
First appearing in 1990, this three-part series depicts the intersection of plant and
human culture. Within each half-opened can sits a naked human body part, while
plant life sprouts above. Beneath these top two layers, Hall adds language. The
three systems make us consider what we share with plants.

Hall's career spans four decades, and continues unabated. She is an extraordinarily
energetic artist. Her work is represented in every major public art collection in
Australia. She exhibits regularly in Australia and overseas.

Hall's early life

Hall grew up in Sydney's southern suburb of Oatley, close to bushland. It was a
natural environment enjoyed by the Hall family who went bushwalking and camping
regularly.

Hall's leaning toward the arts was encouraged by her scientist mother, Ruby Payne-
Scott, who took the 14-year-old Hall to see the landmark exhibition Two Decades of
American Painting at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. For Hall, it left a lasting
impression, spurring her interest in the artistic world.

During high school, Hall decided upon a career in art. In her final years she found the
Sydney experimental art circles, where she was exposed to radically new ways of
considering modern art, including the use of photography as a form of artistic
expression.

Hall's early works

Fiona Hall (b. 1953), Leura, New South Wales, 1974, photograph. Image courtesy of the artist andRoslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
Despite enrolling in a Diploma of Painting, Hall was drawn to photography. With the
support ofJohn Firth-Smith, her painting teacher, she experimented with
photography, and studied it as a minor with George Schwarz. At the time,
photography was not offered as a major course.
In 1974, while in her third year of art school, Hall exhibited her photographs for the
first time inThoughts and Images: An Exploratory Exhibition of Australian Student
Photography. Other student exhibitors included Bill Henson, Sue Ford and Rodney
Pople.

Hall's early photographs document her surrounds. She investigates the proliferation
of exotic plant species in the native environment in Leura, New South Wales (1974);
the different textures of Bondi Beach (1975); and the idea of trouble in paradise
in Oatley, Sydney (1974).

By her early-20s, Hall was already a professional photographer; her work exhibited,
collected and published.

Exploring photography and beyond

Hall, Fiona (b. 1953), Pett Level, England, 1978, gelatin silver photograph. Image courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery,
Sydney.
After graduating in 1975, Hall headed to Europe. Based in London, she worked as
an assistant to Fay Godwin, well-known English photographer, and spent her spare
time absorbed in various galleries, museums and libraries of Europe.

In 1977, Hall held her first solo exhibition at London's Creative Camera Gallery. And,
in 1978, during a brief visit home to care for her sick mother, she held her first
Australian solo exhibition at the Church Street Photography Centre in Melbourne.

Hall's images around this time reveal a move away from merely documenting, toward
more personal, less defined images, such as London (1976) and Pett Level,
England (1978).

With her growing interest in multiple perspectives and experimentation, Hall went to
America for further study. Between 1978 and 1982, she undertook the Workshop
Program at theVisual Studies Workshop (VSW) in Rochester, New York. For her
artist's residency, she returned to Hobart, Australia in 1981, and made The
Antipodean Suite.

The VSW, led by Nathan Lyons, fed Hall's leaning toward experimentation and
immediately impacted on her work. She made a decisive move to manipulated
photography; one that incorporated the use of diverse objects and art forms.

Searching and 'making sense'

Hall, Fiona (b. 1953), Gluttony, The Seven Deadly Sins, 1985, Polaroid photograph. Image courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9
Gallery, Sydney.
In 1983, Hall took up a photo studies lecturing position at the South Australian
School of Art. During this decade, she also developed a strong profile, producing
several notable series' and seven solo exhibitions.

Hall's attempt to understand the world was largely informed by European literature.
In particular, she studied the English Romantic poets, such as TS Eliot, traditional
Christian texts and ancient philosophy. Her investigations resulted in works that
broadly deal with order and chaos, good and evil.

In 1984, Hall created a suite of Morality dolls – the Seven Deadly Sins, her first
three-dimensional works since high school. A year later, she produced a second
suite, using oversized Polaroid photographs. Both suites investigate the human
body, sexuality, order and chaos.

Hall, Fiona (b. 1953), Purgatory, canto XVI: The Wrathful, 1988, Polaroid photograph, KODAK (Australasia) PTY LTD Fund 1989.
Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia: NGA 89.1429.
In 1988, Hall produced Illustrations to Dante's 'Divine Comedy' (1988) in response to
the journeys through Hell, Purgatory and finally Paradise in Dante's Divine Comedy.
She used shredded sardine cans as flames, barbed wire on top of the gate to
Purgatory and various other metal and hardware items. It was the first time she
made the objects to photograph herself.

In 1989, Hall developed the first of her Paradisus terrestris series while at

theAustralia Council's studio in New York's SoHo district. As its title implies, this work
addresses the idea of paradise. Its first showing at the 1990 Adelaide Biennial of
Contemporary Art received great critical and popular success.

At the end of 1990, Hall's project, Words (1990) used unemotional and cooperative

metal bodies to spell out sentences. According to Julie Ewington, author of The Art
of Fiona Hall (2005), Words signifies a break from Hall's journey through darkness,
chaos and distress, into self-acceptance and composure.

Hall: Contemporary life

From the 1990's, Hall turned her attention to making sense of modern life. As a result
of her artistic success, she taught only half of each year between 1990 and 1997,
allowing her to focus more on her art. She resigned in 2002 to work on her art full-
time.

Hall continues to investigate issues ranging from consumption, politics and trade to
the environment, nature, paradise and the body. Her choice of everyday materials
and ways of using them is critical to her exploration.

Notable influences on Hall's work from the 1990's include artist residencies where
she studied plant specimens (e.g. at Mt Coot-tha Botanic Gardens in Brisbane, and
in the country estate, Lunuganga in Sri Lanka), and animal specimens (e.g. at the
South Australian Museum). The impact of her Sri Lankan experience is particularly
evident in the Sri Lankan Paradisus terrestris (1999) series.

Select Works from the 1990s

Hall, Fiona (b. 1953), Medicine bundle for the non-born child, 1993-94, aluminium, rubber, plastic layette comprising matinee jacket.
Image courtesy of Queensland Art Gallery.
In 1994, Hall's Biodata explored the social and political implications of trade.
For Medicine bundle for the non-born child (1994), she knitted a baby's matinee
jacket, bonnet and bootees from shredded Coca-Cola cans, attended by a six-pack
of Coke cans with rubber nipples. It addresses notions of nurturing within our
consumer society, referencing Coca-Cola as a symbol of plant degradation and
cultural imperialism.

In 1996, Hall exhibited Give a dog a bone, a sharp criticism of consumerism. This

installation comprised household objects carved from soap, arranged in cardboard
boxes. In the middle of them is a photograph of her father, whose naked body is
covered in a huge cape make of knitted strips of Coca-Cola cans. He is the 'king' of
the castle of worthless objects. Significantly, this is Hall's last photograph.
Hall, Fiona (b. 1953), Fern garden, 1998, tree ferns, river pebbles, granite, steel, concrete, copper wood mulch, water. Image courtesy
of National Gallery of Australia: NGA 98.16.
In 1998, Hall was commissioned by the National Gallery of Australia to produce Fern
garden. Employing the Dicksonia antarctica tree fern, one of Australia's most ancient
plants, she created a womb-like space for reflection. This connection with plants is a
theme revisited from her earlier Paradisus terrestris.

Selected recent works

In recent years, Hall has used paper currency in works such as Leaf litter (1999-
2003) andTender (2003-05). In the series of works Leaf litter, she painted life-size
portraits of leaves over banknotes from the leaf's country of origin. The series of 183
sheets speak of the degradation of plant life, telling us, pointedly, that money can't
buy everything.

Tender tells a similar story about the effects of modernisation on the habitat of many
species, including birds. It features dozens of birds' nests made from shredded US
dollar bills.

Hall, Fiona (b. 1953), Understorey (detail), 1999-2004, glass beads, silver wire, rubber, boar's teeth, vitrine. Image courtesy of the artist
and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
Hall's Understorey (1999-2004) employs glass beads (the currency of colonisation)
threaded onto wire to create three-dimensional objects depicting elements of plant
and human material. The use of camouflage patterning aptly depicts the
juxtaposition of nature and the conflicts over territory threatening it.

One of Hall's most recent works, Mourning chorus (2007-08), again addresses

humanity's impact on the environment.  The ‘bodies' of 11 extinct or endangered bird
species are made from disposable plastic chemical containers, and their beaks are
from carved and cast resin.  They sit in museological vitrines (as do some of Hall's
other works) emphasising them as collected species.
Hall, Fiona (b. 1953), Castles in the air of the cave dwellers (detail), 2007-08. Image courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery,
Sydney.
In a similar vein, Castles in the air of the cave dwellers(2007-08) are larger-than-life
human brains, from which the structures of social animals, such as bees, ants and
wasps, are attached.  They are hybrid creations made of the human and natural
worlds.

Since the 1990's, Hall has participated in several national and international solo and
group exhibitions.