Judy Chicago’s Remarkable Body of Work

What’s remarkable about the first comprehensive survey of her work, Judy Chicago: A Retrospective at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, is seeing how the 82-year-old artist’s commitment to her art has never flagged and how her work has stayed radical over six decades.

Curator Claudia Schmuckli made the unusual decision of presenting Chicago’s work in reverse chronology, starting with The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction (2015–2019), back to her pastel, minimalist paintings and sculptures in the ’60s and ’70s. In both her topics (extinction, birth, the Holocaust, gender) and her use of materials (needlework, sculpture, stained glass, ceramics, painting), Chicago consistently kept pushing and innovating.

Chicago’s work should have gotten recognition throughout her career, Schmuckli said at a preview of the show, bringing up the Guerrilla Girls’ famous 1988 poster, The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, and number four in particular: “Knowing your career might pick up after you’re 80.”

Chicago, who has founded two feminist art programs and made it her mission to fight the erasure of female artists, expressed regret over the setbacks and roadblocks she’d faced as a woman artist. But she said she felt lucky to have continually pursued her vision.

“It has been a privilege to be able to work for over 60 years in my studio without thinking about the art market,” she said. “I’ve tried to create a body of art and, as with the invocation of this stained glass window you’ll see downstairs, Rainbow Shabbat: A Vision for the Future, I hope my art can lead us all out of the darkness we’re in.”

The show comes soon after the 40th anniversary of Chicago’s most famous piece, The Dinner Party, composed of a triangular table with 39 place settings of famous women like abbess, mystic, and writer Hildegarde of Bingen; abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth; the goddess Kali; and 17th-century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi. The original work is permanently installed at the Brooklyn Museum, but it’s represented here with drawings and test plates as well as a film, Right Out of History: The Making of Judy Chicago's Dinner Party.

Chicago spoke about when the work first opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979.

“Forty years ago, I was here for the opening of The Dinner Party,” she said. “At that time, Henry Hopkins, who was the director of the San Francisco Museum of Art, said to me, ‘Judy, this is the culmination of your career.’ And I said, ‘Henry, I’m just getting started.’”

Enthusiastic audiences showed up for The Dinner Party (about 100,000 people in just three months), and it went on an international tour, but many art critics panned it (the New York Times’ critic, for example, calling it “crass and solemn and single-minded”). Partly because of its large size, it went into storage in 1988, something that Chicago called the lowest point in her career.

“I had to read reviews saying I couldn’t draw,” she said. “I’ve been drawing since I was three. I started taking art lessons when I was five. For me, living and drawing were almost synonymous.”

Along with The Dinner Party, other major bodies of Chicago’s work are represented, like The Birth Project (1980–1985), a collaborative needlework project showing women as bearers of life; PowerPlay (1982–1987), examining gender and, as Schmuckli says, anticipating “current ideas of toxic masculinity”; and The Holocaust Project: From Darkness Into Light (1985–1993), investigating genocide and patriarchal abuse.

Chicago says that some curators help an artist see things they couldn’t before and that Schmuckli put together the show in a way that enables her to see connections between her bodies of work as well as all the research she did before formulating images.

“I see the same hand and the same color sense and the same rigor that came out of my L.A. days,” said Chicago, who earned a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Chicago said that she sees form as a means to convey the content of her work.

“For me, the formal elements of art are there to help us make images that allow people to look at subject matter that maybe they couldn’t look at in any other way,” she said, adding that she can’t talk about the extinction series without bursting into tears.

Art’s power to educate and inspire if it deals with issues people care about is particularly urgent in the face of climate change, she added.

Chicago’s work has always been radical and driven by social justice, Schmuckli said, and uses media that’s often excluded from the artistic canon, considered to be “feminine,” such as ceramics and needlework. Schmuckli said she would like people to leave the show with a new appreciation for Chicago’s work as a visionary artist.

“My desire is for visitors to see Judy Chicago not just as a historical figure whose work speaks to the social turmoils of the past,” she said, “but one whose work, whether old or new, is deeply resonant with the present.”

Schmuckli also said how much she’d enjoyed working on the show.

“I’m so grateful to have gotten to know you,” she said, turning to Chicago from the lectern. “You still kick ass.”

Judy Chicago: A Retrospective is at the de Young Museum through January 9.