Before SanDy Kim raised eyebrows by taking evocative photographs of her menstruation or Petra Collins was showing off her soiled underwear at a gallery in the Lower East Side, bold and uncompromising artists like Judy Chicago paved the way for radical female expression. Chicago is now the subject of Chicago in LA: Judy Chicago’s Early Work 1963–74, on display at the Brooklyn Museum. This Saturday, in celebration of the artist's seventy-fifth birthday, the exhibition is performing her site-specific A Butterfly for Brooklyn in Prospect Park. The pyrotechnic performance—a 200 feet wide by 180 feet high set of fireworks in the shape of a butterfly––will explore feminist imagery on a gigantesque scale.
Born Judy Cohen in 1939 in Chicago, Illinois, the artist decided to take the name of her hometown as her surname after the deaths of her father and first husband. Like many female artists at the time, Chicago was discouraged by her professors from painting any symbolic or formal evocation of female sexuality, which she mainly expressed through biomorphic shapes that resembled breasts and wombs. After graduating, she started hanging out with macho male artists at BARNEY’S BEANERY in West Hollywood and adopted their tough-guy attitudes. She mastered power tools, auto-body painting techniques, and fiberglass casting, which she used to create large scale minimalist pieces in lush, candy colors. During this time, she became an active participant in the Finish Fetish School, which reacted to the swift post-World War II industrialization of the West Coast by claiming its own brightly colored, high-gloss form of Minimalism.
The exhibition focuses on the first decade of her career, tracking the metamorphosis from subtly subversive works created while she was a graduate student at UCLA to her iconic piece The Dinner Party, which is generally regarded as the first epic feminist artwork. The massive installation, housed in the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, features 39 extravagant place settings on a large triangular table that each represents women of historical significance including Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Susan B. Anthony, and Georgia O'Keeffe.
Walking through the gallery space feels like you have entered a perverse game of Candy Land, where a confectionery swirl of lollipops, donuts, and rainbow-colored circles that allude to female anatomy greet you. Pieces like Click Cunts, a series of colorful disc-shaped drawings, express female sexuality through the veil of Minimalism. Chicago’s larger scale acrylic paintings are truly magnificent, creating an atmosphere that is simultaneously calming and disorienting. Works such as Queen Victoria have a trippy effect, with a pinwheel at the center that moves like a Magic Eye painting when you fix your gaze on it. Through the Flower sucks you into its glowing orb-like center with the force of a vortex. But the most hypnotic works in the exhibit are drawings from the Female Rejection Series. Here, Judy writes her contemplations under each picture, unapologetically exposing her struggles and fears through a fascinating inner monologue.
Check out the video below of Chicago's Butterfly for Pomona performance at Pomona College in 2012 for a preview of what's to come Saturday!
Butterfly for Brooklyn will be performe
Born Judy Cohen in 1939 in Chicago, Illinois, the artist decided to take the name of her hometown as her surname after the deaths of her father and first husband. Like many female artists at the time, Chicago was discouraged by her professors from painting any symbolic or formal evocation of female sexuality, which she mainly expressed through biomorphic shapes that resembled breasts and wombs. After graduating, she started hanging out with macho male artists at BARNEY’S BEANERY in West Hollywood and adopted their tough-guy attitudes. She mastered power tools, auto-body painting techniques, and fiberglass casting, which she used to create large scale minimalist pieces in lush, candy colors. During this time, she became an active participant in the Finish Fetish School, which reacted to the swift post-World War II industrialization of the West Coast by claiming its own brightly colored, high-gloss form of Minimalism.
The exhibition focuses on the first decade of her career, tracking the metamorphosis from subtly subversive works created while she was a graduate student at UCLA to her iconic piece The Dinner Party, which is generally regarded as the first epic feminist artwork. The massive installation, housed in the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, features 39 extravagant place settings on a large triangular table that each represents women of historical significance including Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Susan B. Anthony, and Georgia O'Keeffe.
Walking through the gallery space feels like you have entered a perverse game of Candy Land, where a confectionery swirl of lollipops, donuts, and rainbow-colored circles that allude to female anatomy greet you. Pieces like Click Cunts, a series of colorful disc-shaped drawings, express female sexuality through the veil of Minimalism. Chicago’s larger scale acrylic paintings are truly magnificent, creating an atmosphere that is simultaneously calming and disorienting. Works such as Queen Victoria have a trippy effect, with a pinwheel at the center that moves like a Magic Eye painting when you fix your gaze on it. Through the Flower sucks you into its glowing orb-like center with the force of a vortex. But the most hypnotic works in the exhibit are drawings from the Female Rejection Series. Here, Judy writes her contemplations under each picture, unapologetically exposing her struggles and fears through a fascinating inner monologue.
Check out the video below of Chicago's Butterfly for Pomona performance at Pomona College in 2012 for a preview of what's to come Saturday!
Butterfly for Brooklyn will be performe