Artwork Description
Judy Chicago – Male Head
Dimensions: 28.75 x 22 x 2″ finished size
Year: 1986
Medium: relief cast bronze wall sculpture
Edition: ed. 1/10
Judy Chicago created a body of work titled “Power Play,” in which she explored male expression of emotion. Throughout history, female figures have been rendered as vessels of emotion, but Chicago wondered how portraying emotion in the male embodiment could help us better understand why there is so much violence and trauma in the world.
Judy Chicago advocates issues of women’s liberation and independence through diverse media including paintings, drawings, sculptures, and collaborative installations. Her iconic work “The Dinner Party,” (1974–1979), which is now permanently installed in the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, is widely regarded as one of the most influential works of feminist art. With Miriam Schapiro, Chicago co-founded the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts—the first program of its kind—and collaborated on the formative installation Womanhouse (1972). More recently, Chicago has expanded upon her efforts in gender politics, focusing on broader social issues. Her work has been exhibited extensively at venues such as the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the New Museum, the Centre Pompidou, the Whitney Museum, and the Jewish Museum in New York.
Judy Chicago speaks of her work as “trying to infuse women and women’s history with a sense of the sacred and the valuable, because there are all these things associated with women that have been devalued: our bodies, our crafts, our history,” continuing on to say she “tried to bring the same thing to bear on [her] work.”