Turner Carroll is proud to present the online exhibition film, Judy Chicago: A Revolution in Print. Narrated by Tonya Turner Carroll, this film explores each print in panoramic detail and in the context of Chicago’s six-decade journey in printmaking. Parallel to the upcoming retrospective at the de Young Museum, this film serves as a retrospective in its own right and is presented in celebration of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation acquiring the print archive of Judy Chicago.
MINIMALIST PRINTS
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At the beginning of her career, Chicago created a significant body of minimal art which, for a long time, remained unknown even though her work was curated into the influential 1965 exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York. To paraphrase curator Jenni Sorkin’s analysis of Chicago’s minimalist work, such as “Flashback, Version 2,” they are among the most complex and unknown of her career.
FEMINIST PRINTS
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Chicago’s feminist images include some of her most recognizable imagery, such as “Through the Flower” and “Into the Darkness.” In these works, we can see the influence of Chicago’s self-guided study of women’s artworks throughout history. Symbolism such as the circle and the flower appear in these images, invoking quintessentially “female” aspects such as creation, fertility, hope, and rebirth.
ON FIRE PRINTS
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Chicago began her Atmospheres performative works as an exercise in her own unique version of land art. While male land artists were cutting into the earth and otherwise harming it via intrusive artistic techniques, Chicago’s inclination was to soften it and enhance its beauty. Chicago says her colored smoke works “softened everything,” and that “when the smoke began to clear, the whole world was feminized—if only for a moment.”
THE DINNER PARTY PRINTS
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Emerging from her determination not to allow for the erasure of women’s contributions to history, Judy Chicago elucidated their impact through The Dinner Party, now housed at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The Dinner Party is now heralded as “the female equivalent of The Last Supper” and “The most important work of feminist art in the history of art,” but it was not always well received.
BIRTH PROJECT PRINTS
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From The Dinner Party, which celebrated women’s cultural achievements throughout history, Chicago moved on to the more primal and ultimate creative act—the creation of life itself. Her Birth Project works celebrate various aspects of the birth process; from the painful to the mythical.
POWERPLAY PRINTS
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While still engaged with the Birth Project, Judy Chicago began to wonder about the nature of power as it relates to gender. She started a series of work titled PowerPlay, examining the gender construct of masculinity. She cast a critical eye to the negative ways in which men have exercised power and some of the consequences for both them and for the world.
HOLOCAUST PROJECT AND VOICES FROM THE SONG OF SONGS PRINTS
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Judy Chicago became interested in depicting images of the Holocaust as a result of her investigation i issues of power and powerlessness, and her interest in the ways of being Jewish shaped both her art and her life. In collaboration with her photographer husband, Donald Woodman, they plunged into an eight-year attempt to understand the evil and cruelty that live under the surface of civilizations past and present.
EROTICA PRINTS
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“Butterfly Vagina Erotica” from 1975 is an early example of Chicago’s erotica. The butterfly, in its transformation from a caterpillar, became synonymous with Chicago’s transformative female imagery.
THE END: A MEDITATION ON DEATH AND EXTINCTION PRINTS
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Created between 2012 and 2018, the works in the series, The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction, explore the subjects of death, Chicago’s own mortality, and the tragic, ongoing extinction of many other animal species. Chicago asks viewers to contemplate their own fate as it is tied to the treatment of other species and the planet and to understand the works’ foundation in the feminist principle that justice for women is connected to the need for a global justice that includes the humane treatment of all creatures.
Introduction to Judy Chicago: A Revolution in Print