WOMAN’S WORK Judy Chicago September 26, 2009 - January 23, 2010

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"The Fall (detail)"

Judy Chicago, "The Fall (detail)," modified Aubusson tapestry, wool and silk, 1993, 54" X 216", woven by Audrey Cowan. Collection of Audrey and Robert Cowan. PHOTO: © DONALD WOODMAN

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"The Fall (detail)"

Judy Chicago, "The Fall (detail)," modified Aubusson tapestry, wool and silk, 1993, 54" X 216", woven by Audrey Cowan. Collection of Audrey and Robert Cowan. PHOTO: © DONALD WOODMAN

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"The Creation (detail)"

Judy Chicago, "The Creation (detail)," modified Aubusson tapestry, wool, silk and gold threads, 1984, 42" X 168", woven by Audrey Cowan. Collection of Audrey and Robert Cowan. PHOTO: © DONALD WOODMAN

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"Turn Over a New Leaf"

Judy Chicago, "Turn Over a New Leaf," painting, embroidery and appliqué on linen and silk charmeuse, 2000, 22" X 28", needlework by Jane Gaddie Thompson. PHOTO: © DONALD WOODMAN

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"Birth Tear/Tear"

Judy Chicago, "Birth Tear/Tear," macramé, mixed threads on fabric base, 1985, 46" X 55.5", executed by Pat Rudy-Baese. Collection of The Albuquerque Museum. PHOTO: © THROUGH THE FLOWER

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"The Dinner Party"

Judy Chicago, "The Dinner Party," mixed media, 1979. In the permanent collection of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, The Brooklyn Museum. PHOTO: THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM

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"The Fall (detail)"

Judy Chicago, "The Fall (detail)," modified Aubusson tapestry, wool and silk, 1993, 54" X 216", woven by Audrey Cowan. Collection of Audrey and Robert Cowan. PHOTO: © DONALD WOODMAN

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WOMAN'S WORK

Thirty years after the dinner party, maverick artist Judy Chicago finds new life in an Art Gallery of Calgary retrospective of her iconic textiles.

BY Mary-Beth Laviolette

As an artist and a feminist icon, Judy Chicago is feeling pretty good these days. “I have outlived my critics. That’s why my career is a miracle!” she says from her home in New Mexico. “I set out to break the cycle of erasure with The Dinner Party and in the mid-90s, when my career was in the toilet, it looked like The Dinner Partywould be erased too.”

Erasure is not a word that sits well with any feminist of Chicago’s generation. A generation that, in its coming-of-age in the 1960s and 70s, can recall the general absence of women in positions of influence, prominence or power and, more tellingly, the small number present in the canon of Western history (or ‘his-story’ as some feminists called it then). Chicago, with the training of an artist and the fervour of an activist, set out to do something about this omission and, with a group of volunteers — many of them well-versed in either needlework, ceramics or other craft — created The Dinner Party. Four years in the making, the monumental artwork debuted in 1979 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Invoking the Christian (all-male) Last Supper, 39 women (actual or mythological) are each honoured at The Dinner Party’s long triangular table with an elaborate place setting: embroidered runner, flatware, chalice and a painted-china plate. Accompanying the table, is the porcelain tile Heritage Floor, inscribed with the names of another 999 women.

From the distant past to the 20th century, history’s roll call at The Dinner Party never looked so unfamiliar when, as a history major, I first saw the work in 1982. Every now and then, there would be a moment of recognition, a Georgia O’Keefe, a Katharine Hepburn or an Emily Carr, but the French astronomer Hortense Lepaute or Isabella Bishop, the English explorer?

In a way that few artists ever experience, The Dinner Party was a career-defining work for Chicago. As it toured, the installation was popular enough to attract record-breaking crowds (and more volunteers for future projects) but controversial enough to stir-up debate. And in many corners of the art world, and in certain feminist circles,The Dinner Party was like tainted food. There were suspicions regarding exploited volunteers, and disapproval about symbolically commemorating any woman — let alone 39 of them — with stylized vulvic imagery. Literally, vaginas on plates. Too little nuance and too much universalizing about women, they criticized.

At worst, there was also just plain indifference. “I wasn’t supported by the art world,” the artist recalls. “My career is a story with no powerful curator, museum, gallery owner or collector to support my art. Only individuals have stepped forth. What I discovered was a different audience, women who wanted to look at art which reflected their experience.”

Now 70 years old, another page has turned in Chicago’s life. After many years of being marooned in storage, The Dinner Party, is now on permanent display in a specially designed exhibition space at the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. There is also her inclusion in the first major survey of feminist trailblazing, WACK: Art and the Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art) and the publication in 2007 of the final and definitive book about The Dinner Party. And, if influential textbooks can make an impact, a full page feature is devoted to the work in the 7th edition of Janson and Janson’s A Basic History of Western Art. About the artwork, the book concludes “…. its gender politics, commentary on contemporary society, use of so many different styles and periods announced the art of the 1980s, an art that still prevails today and has come to be called Post-Modernism.”

Now, If Women Ruled the World: Judy Chicago in Thread, is the first-ever survey of her textile and needlework art. Curated by Allyson Mitchell and featuring an excellent catalogue, the exhibition is an all-Canadian initiative involving Toronto’s Textile Museum of Canada and the Art Gallery of Calgary. Featuring 25 core works with an additional seven pieces loaned by Chicago for the AGC presentation, the survey deals with life after The Dinner Party, concentrating on three other collaborative series that followed.

There is the Birth Project (1980 - 1985) where again, she wanted to address an ‘absence’, namely the lack of art about what she calls “one of the most fundamental experiences of life”. With Holocaust Project (1988 - 1990) Chicago began to expand her creative vision. Resolutions for the Millennium: A Stitch in Time (1994 - 2000) is inspired by traditional samplers and proverbs, and offers a “more positive vision of the world to come”. Involving, as always, the efforts of dozens of (acknowledged) needle-workers who, in partnership, make her designs and concepts a material reality,Resolutions, also uniquely combines their needlework with Chicago’s painting (it should be noted that she also works prolifically on her own in sculpture, painting, works on paper, stained and fused glass.)

This fall exhibition at the Art Gallery of Calgary isn’t the first time that Judy Chicago has shown in western Canada. Resolutions toured to the Edmonton Art Gallery earlier in the decade, but it was the Glenbow Museum’s hosting of that famous work nearly 30 years ago that is most memorable. Given The Dinner Party’s place in the canon of 20th century art, I was curious about how the work still reverberated today. I emailed more than two dozen colleagues about it and, surprisingly, more than half responded.

There were plenty of kudos for The Dinner Party’s attention to women’s history. “[For] a woman artist at the start of my career — in those days you had to look far to find women and they were always separated out and presented as aberrations, or maybe even abhorations,” writes author Katherine Govier. In addition, there is still a recognition that The Dinner Party was a ground-breaking piece because of its use of craft materials and techniques. “It made me quite proud to be working in the ceramic medium,” says artist Evelyn Grant, who at the time of The Dinner Party’s debut was a recent BFA graduate from the University of Calgary.

“There was a lot of talk in those days of ‘phallic symbols’ in art by male artists and so I guess [The Dinner Party’s genital imagery] was an attempt to counter with a distinctively female symbol,” adds visual artist Arlene Stamp. “It seems naïve now and a pretty simplistic way to think of ‘women’s art’ but the controversy it caused….tells us that it was a daring gesture nevertheless.” Barbara Todd remembers being awestruck and “I felt then as I do now, that had Ms. Chicago’s aesthetic vision been less heavy-handed the work would have been more powerful.” Victoria-based Colleen (Kerr) Gray never had a chance to see The Dinner Party but as a young up-and-coming artist who once excelled in performance and video art in Calgary, what intrigues her about the impact of Chicago and others is the current resurgence in what she refers to as “the feminine arts”. “As a matter of fact,” she says. “I’ve become a secret needlework artist myself.”

Partnering with the Chicago survey at the Art Gallery of Calgary, the show She Will Always Be Younger Than Us(from the Textile Museum of Canada) mixes contemporary art practices like video and online technology with “feminine” tasks like knitting, embroidery and quilting. Featuring five artists who were either in diapers or not even born when The Dinner Party first rattled the public conscience, the exhibition not only hooks its needle on a current Generation X penchant for knitting circles and quilting bees, but is also an expression of what curator, Allyson Mitchell, describes as an intergenerational dialogue.

“While feminism may be as old as the suffragists, it is also as young as its newest enthusiast,” Mitchell writes. Contributing to that craft-bending dialogue that now embraces topics like gender, human rights, queer politics, globalization and the Newfoundland folk heroine, Peg Bearskin, is Orly Cogan, Wednesday Lupypciw, Cat Mazza, Gillian Strong and Ginger Brooks Takahashi. She Will Always Be Younger Than Us and When Women Rule the World: Judy Chicago in Thread opens September 25 in Calgary. Both are on view to January 23, 2010.

Calgary’s Weiss Gallery will also feature a show of more than 100 works by Judy Chicago September 26 to January 23 — drawings, paintings, ceramics, textiles, lithographs, glass.