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Judy Chicago Selected for 7th Edition of Janson’s History of Art

LewAllen Contemporary
10-05-05
Santa Fe, NM—Judy Chicago has played a major role in shaping contemporary art for more than 40 years. As a pioneer and founder of the Feminist Art movement in the ’70s, Chicago has continually challenged accepted ways of seeing, working successfully in numerous media: painting, drawing, printmaking, ceramics, china-painting, needlework, narrative tapestry and more recently, in glass. She has pushed the limits of each of these techniques, exploring them for their particular visual and expressive potential.

In each of her projects, from her early Minimalist works to The Dinner Party, the Birth Project, and Powerplay, to later works such the Holocaust Project and Resolutions: A Stitch in Time, she has chosen media to fit not only her aesthetic, but also the personal, social, and political intentions of her imagery. Combined with her acute sense of social and political content, historically the hallmark of many of her projects, Chicago’s extraordinary fluency with the foregoing diverse media has helped distinguish her work like the greatest masters in art.

The coming year marks a key chapter in the history of this important artist, with the opening in late March 2007 of the newly constructed Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, designed specifically to house the permanent installation of Chicago’s foundational work, The Dinner Party. Not only a landmark victory in the artist’s long and productive career, this event also marks the first major step in the institutionalization of Feminist Art—and its rich, complex history—within the larger context of 20th century art and culture.

A new, expanded and definitive edition, The Dinner Party: From Creation to Preservation, by Judy Chicago, with photographs by Donald Woodman, will be published by Merrell Publishers in February 2007. “By the time this book is published,” states Chicago, “I will have been working on The Dinner Party for over 30 years.” The reasons the artist has remained involved in this work for such a long time is discussed in this new, lavishly illustrated book, which includes—for the first time—a complete photographic record of this 20th century monument to heroic and influential women along with new research undertaken by Chicago to bring to life more fully the 1,038 women it honors.

Another milestone in Chicago’s career comes with the first critical biography of her life and work with Dr. Gail Levin’s brilliantly written biography, Becoming Judy Chicago, published by Harmony Books, also in February 2007. Levin, a Professor of Art History, American Studies, and Women Studies at Baruch College and The Graduate School of the City University of New York, is the biographer of such luminaries as Edward Hopper and Aaron Copeland. Lee Krasner will be the focus of her next biographical work.

Surrounding the opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and the re-opening of The Dinner Party will be a widespread national celebration of the Feminist Art movement and Chicago’s significant contribution and legacy. Numerous venues will be examining and showing the work of Judy Chicago throughout 2007 and 2008. Opening at the Hebrew Union College in February 2007 is the show “Judy Chicago: Jewish Identity,” the first exhibition exploring Chicago’s work on Jewish themes. In early March 2007, LAMOCA in Los Angeles will unveil “WACK: Art and the Feminist Revolution,” which is the first historic survey of Feminist Art from 1965 to 1980, curated by Connie Butler, now the Curator of Drawings and Prints at MOMA and an expert in Feminist Art. This show is slated to travel to the National Museum of Women’s Art in Washington in the fall of 2007. Chicago’s art will be an important part of the exhibition. The opening of The Dinner Party in Brooklyn will be closely followed by a show of selected preparatory studies and test plates at New York City’s ACA Gallery.

In addition, LewAllen Contemporary in Santa Fe, New Mexico, will open “Dreaming Up The Dinner Party,” a major exhibition featuring test plates and studies in May 2007. “Chicago in Glass,” the premier exhibition of Chicago’s work in glass, debuts at LewAllen Contemporary in November 2006, and will begin traveling to other venues in the fall of 2007 with its first stop at the Canadian Ceramics and Glass Gallery in Waterloo, Ontario, in September 2007.

Judy Chicago and her illustrious career were selected for inclusion in the recently published 7th edition of Janson’s History of Art, the canonical and legendary survey text in art history (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007). With this edition, one of the most influential authorities within the art community has finally acknowledged how Chicago’s artistry has changed art history and the way historians, curators, and collectors think about art. In the 7th edition of Janson and Janson’s A Basic History of Western Art (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006) Chicago is credited not only for her role as a leader in the Feminist Art movement but also as a forerunner of the late 20th century movement known as Post-Modernism.

For more than four decades, Chicago has remained steadfast in her commitment to the power of art as a vehicle for intellectual transformation and social change and to women’s right to engage in the highest level of art production. As a result, she has become a symbol for people everywhere, known and respected as an artist, writer, teacher, and humanist whose work and life are models for an enlarged definition of art, an expanded role for the artist, and women’s right to freedom of expression. In the coming months, Judy Chicago’s four decades of creativity, activism, and dedication come full circle as she and her extraordinary pioneering work are finally accorded the central place in contemporary art that they have long deserved and the art world recognizes the international impact of her unique vision of what art can be.