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2008 Spring

Judy Chicago: That Being Said

From her home in Arizona, Judy Chicago speaks with P.S.1 Curatorial Advisor Phong Bui.

Judy Chicago

Photo © Donald Woodman

Phong Bui: I know that you were born in Chicago in 1939, and had gone to UCLA in 1962 for both undergraduate and graduate school. What sort of work did you do then?

Judy Chicago: I started out as a painting major, but there was so much discrimination against women in the painting department that I sought solace in the sculpture department, and as a result I went back and forth. My graduate show consisted of a number of paintings and sculptures that had what would now be called a proto-feminist consciousness—very biomorphic forms that all of the professors absolutely hated! At any rate, as Artforum had just moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco in 1965, Philip Leider and John Coplans would go around and look at young artists and graduate students to help prop up the art scene. Even though I was a serious hard-working young artist who had started showing my work from early on, I learned very quickly that gender was not supposed to surface in your work.

Women were simply not taken seriously. There was no prohibition against saying things like, “You can’t be a woman and be an artist too,” which John Coplans used to say to me. It’s still really difficult for today’s young artists to comprehend what it was like then.

PB: But your painting Rainbow Picket was included in Kynaston McShine’s legendary show Primary Structures!

JC: Well, after graduate school I had a studio in Pasadena—I also helped find studios for Mark di Suvero, while Ron Davis and Bruce Nauman were around the corner—which was full of artists because it was cheap. Walter Hopps used to make the rounds to artists’ studios once a month. I had just finished Rainbow Picket and Walter refused to look at it. So when it was selected for the Primary Structures show, he walked around with Clement Greenberg, who pointed out Rainbow Picket and asked who the artist was. Walter said, “Oh, I know her.” But of course years later I had breakfast with Walter and he said, “I know you hated me, Judy. I know that I treated you badly, but you have to understand that from our perspective women artists were either groupies or artists’ wives.  What was I to do with the fact that you were making work that was stronger than a lot of the male artists?”

PB: Did Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique have any effect on your thinking in relation to what was happening to the popular public at the time?

JC: No. It had no effect on me because I wasn’t a housewife. I was a serious artist and I wanted to make an important contribution to art history, and as a result I was incredibly isolated, because most other women had been brainwashed by The Feminine Mystique. The literature that affected me was the literature that came out of New York radical feminists at the end of the 1960s—Redstockings, S.C.U.M. Manifesto—women who had rebelled, who were refusing to succumb to the ideas that Betty Friedan outlined in The Feminine Mystique.

PB: When did this realization come about?

JC: By the end of the 1960s I began my self-guided study tour of women’s history, trying to read their works as thoroughly as I could—Jane Austen, George Sand, George Elliot, Virginia Woolf, as well as other 19th and 20th century women writers—to see if there was anything from their experience that could help mine. From that point on, I decided that I was going to make a radical departure in my work, a feminist art practice. I began to retrace my steps back to when I was in college, and while I was teaching at Fresno, I created a class for women that would allow them to build their professional identity without denying who they were as women. In the spring of 1970, Paul Brach and Miriam Schapiro invited me to bring my program to Cal-Arts.

PB: That was when you and Miriam Schapiro created Womanhouse, and everything else you had done led up to The Dinner Party. What about your struggle between formal abstraction and your feminist vision? For example Through the Flower and The Rejection Quintet, evoke great affinities with both Georgia O’Keeffe’s synthesis of abstraction and representation, and with Frida Kahlo’s powerful narrative!

JC: It is very important to remember that many of the women artists like Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keefe and Alice Neel were brought to prominence by the feminist art movement, but now I feel the goals of the feminist art movement cannot be realized without cooperation between women and men.