Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago (born Judith Sylvia Cohen on July 20, 1939 in Chicago , Illinois ) is an American feminist artist and writer. She became known through her work The Dinner Party .
Life
Born Judith Cohen, she grew up in Chicago in a family with a strong Jewish-American tradition, but was raised secularly by her unionized parents. She received her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from the University of California in Los Angeles . She is currently the artistic director of Flower , a non-profit art organization that she founded in 1978 in connection with her artistic work. Her current husband is the photographer Donald Woodman .
Artistic work
Womanhouse (1972)
In 1971, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro founded the Feminist Art Program for the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). You were the organizers of one of the first feminist art exhibitions, Womanhouse , from January 30th to February 28th, 1972. At the center of the exhibition was women's housework as a parody of social stereotypes . The income from the sale of various works of art flowed into a feminist art program. The exhibition consisted of installations and a performance in a 17-room abandoned house in Hollywood. In the process of creating art, key feminist concepts such as collaboration and awareness were implemented. The aim of the exhibitors was to actively promote art that focuses on female experiences.
The Dinner Party (1974–1979)
Judy Chicago became internationally known with her work The Dinner Party , in which hundreds of volunteers were involved. Well documented in books, the work has been housed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in the Brooklyn Museum in New York since 2007 . The main part, a homage to the history of women, consists of 39 plates on a triangular table. Each plate is based on the many anatomical variations of a vulva and its poetic description as a flower, designed to match the characteristic cultural contribution or identification mark of the invited. The 39 seats at this fictional dinner of mythical and historically real women are thematically assigned to the three sides:
- The first page with a series of the goddesses of prehistory , up to Hypatia in the time of the Roman Empire, illustrates the forerunners and the appearance of antiquity up to its dissolution.
- The second page with the series from Marcella (325–410), a saint of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches, to Anna Maria von Schürmann (1607–1678), illustrates the influence of Christianity up to the Reformation .
- The third page with the series from Anne Hutchinson (1591–1643) to Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) spans the arc from the American Revolution to the first and second waves of the feminist upheaval .
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1. Page: From Prehistory to the Roman Empire 1. Primordial goddess ( Gaia , Nyx , Ananke , Hemera , Thalassa ) |
2nd page: From the beginnings of Christianity to the Reformation 14. Marcella |
Page 3: From the American to the Feminist Revolution 27. Anne Hutchinson |
The names of another 999 mythical and historical women are recorded on 2300 floor tiles under the table triangle.
Other projects
The Birth Project 1980–1985 brought together a network of trained textile workers across the United States. In the 1993 Holocaust project, the German genocide of the Jews was associated with the universal experience of the vulnerability of human beings. Resolutions of 1994 returned thematically to feminism.
Books
- Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (1975)
- The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage (1979)
- Embroidering Our Heritage: The Dinner Party Needlework (1980)
- The Birth Project (1985)
- Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light (1993)
- The Dinner Party (1996)
- Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist (1996)
- Fragments from the Delta of Venus (2004)
- Kitty City: A Feline Book of Hours (2005)
reception
In 2017, the German choreographer Sasha Waltz performed her dance piece Women in the Elisabethkirche in Berlin as part of the Tanz im August festival . With this work, Waltz referred to the installation The Dinner Party . Critics found the dance piece to be very bloody, while The Dinner Party was “an exquisitely set table for the historical celebrities from Sappho to Virginia Woolf”, “inanimate” and therefore food “for the viewer's imagination”.
literature
- Edward Lucie-Smith ; Judy Chicago: The Other Look - The Woman as a Model and Painter . Knesebeck Verlag, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-89660-062-1
- Gail Levin: Becoming Judy Chicago: A Biography of the Artist . University of California Press, Berkeley 2018, ISBN 978-0-520-97161-5 .
- Elisabeth Bronfen : The fight for the pictures. Man sees woman. Woman sees man. Or: woman sees woman. Notes on the representation of the female body . In: Die Zeit , No. 23/2000
- Judy Chicago. Meeting in London with the artist . In: Wolfgang Mielke (Ed.): Perinique . World Heritage Magazine. No. 16 . Perinique, May 2013, ISSN 1869-9952 , DNB 1000901297 , ZDB -ID 2544795-6 (78-page special issue ).
Web links
- judychicago.com homepage
- Debra Wacks: Judy Chicago. Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 March 2009 (English), Jewish Women's Archive
- Biography, literature and sources for Judy Chicago FemBio of the Institute for Women's Biography Research
- Chicago, Judy, Papers, 1947-2004 Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
- Women's memorial labyrinth developed and realized by Dagmar von Garnier
- Judy Chicago National Women's History Project
See also
Individual evidence
- ^ Encyclopedia Britannica: Judy Chicago
- ^ The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago . Brooklyn Museum
- ^ List of mythical and historical women
- ↑ Wiebke Hüster: The enigmatic woman. In: FAZ.net . September 3, 2017. Retrieved September 4, 2017 .
- ↑ a b Dorion Weickmann: A woman thing. History-conscious choreographers dominate the second half of the Berlin festival Tanz im August. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, No. 201, September 21, 2017, p. 13.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Chicago, Judy |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Cohen, Judith Sylvia (maiden name); Gerowitz, Judy (married name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American feminist artist and writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 20, 1939 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Chicago , Illinois |