Turning Inward, Judy Chicago, From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation
Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, Portland, OR - June 2-Sep 23
Judy Chicago’s lifelong artistic explorations are rooted in art as activism, believing in the power of art as a vehicle for change and societal transformations. Born in 1939, she was an early pioneer of feminist art and education; Chicago founded the first Feminist Art Program in 1970 at California State University.
In her extensive body of work created over six decades, Chicago has employed a gamut of materials and approaches. Her most famous installation, The Dinner Party, was created with hundreds of volunteers from 1974 to 1979. The monumental multimedia project (permanently installed at the Brooklyn Museum) is a symbolic history of women in Western civilization told through meticulous place settings made from ceramic, porcelain and embroidered textiles.
This new exhibition covers Chicago’s career from her early geometric color abstractions and Land Art pyrotechnics in the late 1960s and early 1970s to her powerful statements on gender politics and her explorations of self-identity and personal formative experiences. From 1985 to 1993, Chicago created a haunting body of work based on an eight-year investigation into the Holocaust, genocide and her own Jewish roots. The show focuses on works on paper leading to her monumental pieces. It includes large-scale photo documentations of her Atmospheres series and a powerful glass sculpture, Grand Flaming Fist (2007).
The celebrated multimedia artist had an acclaimed recent retrospective at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. The relentless creator has also authored a new book, The Flowering: The Autobiography of Judy Chicago, published in 2021.
