News

Feminist Artist Judy Chicago to Receive First Retrospective in 2020

Chicago

One of the most influential artists of the ’70s-era Feminist Art Movement is finally getting her own retrospective. Per ARTnews, Judy Chicago announced she will be receiving her first-ever retrospective in May 2020. The show — the largest exhibition of Chicago’s work — will be held at San Francisco’s de Young Museum and is being organized by Claudia Schmuckli.

Chicago is probably best known for 1979’s “The Dinner Party,” an epic installation piece featuring a table laid out with place settings for trailblazing women throughout history, including Frida Kahlo and Iceni queen Boudica. While “The Dinner Party” made Chicago a star in the art world, it will not be the centerpiece of the de Young retrospective.

Instead, the exhibition “will look at the full breadth of Chicago’s work, which has spanned five decades and taken the form of paintings, ceramic sculptures, drawings, prints, and performance work,” ARTnews confirms. It will feature Chicago’s feminist reclamation of Minimalism, her paintings exploring gender and power dynamics, her color theory experimentation, and her fiber, tapestry, and canvas artwork that take on ecological issues. Overall, about 100 of Chicago’s pieces will be spotlighted.

“I’ve been working for a long time,” the artist said. “I used to say I hope lived to long enough to come out from behind the shadow of ‘The Dinner Party.’”

Pieces related to “The Dinner Party” will be included, but Chicago hopes the de Young show will give some of her other, lesser-known work its due, such as “The Holocaust Project.” “It echoes what’s happening now, again, and it’s prescient, unfortunately,” she explained about the 1985–1993 series, which investigates the power and powerlessness of the Jewish people during WWII. “I think there’ll be a lot of discoveries in Claudia’s show.”

Chicago’s retrospective will also include some pieces from her upcoming National Museum of Women in the Arts show, “The End.” Opening in September at the D.C. museum, the series examines death and mortality.

Grants from National Endowment for the Arts and California Arts Commission, the Louisiana World Exposition’s Woman of Achievement of the World prize, the UCLA Alumni Professional Achievement Award, and New Mexico’s Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts are among Chicago’s many accolades. She was also a major figure in the consciousness-raising arts education programs at Fresno State, the California Institute of the Arts, and the Women’s Building during the ’70s.


Women and Hollywood Transition

Dear friends- A little over 15 years ago I had a crazy idea: to try and start a conversation asking where the women were in front of the camera and behind the scenes in Hollywood. I called my blog...

Gina Rodriguez Developing Series Adaptation of “Princess of South Beach” Podcast for Netflix

Gina Rodriguez is celebrating the success of her new ABC comedy “Not Dead Yet” by developing a series adaptation of a popular podcast for Netflix. Deadline reports that the streamer has...

Sophie Lane Curtis Feature Debut “On Our Way” Acquired by Gravitas Ventures

Sophie Lane Curtis’ feature debut has secured distribution. Deadline reports that Gravitas Ventures landed worldwide rights to “On Our Way” with plans to release the award-winning...

Posts Search

Publishing Dates
Start date
- select start date -
End date
- select end date -
Category
News
Films
Interviews
Features
Trailers
Festivals
Television
RESET