October 8 2015–January 10 2016
AZ Azkuna Zentroa
Bilbao
Plaza Arriquibar, 4
48010 Bilbao
Spain
Curated by Xabier Arakistain
The exhibition Why Not Judy Chicago? at Azkuna Zentroa presents a selection of works and documents that provide an overview of over 50 years of production by this pioneer of feminist art. By looking at the close relationship between her work as an artist, art educator, and writer, the exhibition proposes a holistic approach to her career, inasmuch as it retains, with the intention of transforming, the different instances that structure art institutions.
Judy Chicago is a part of the first generation of women to incorporate second-wave feminism into their art practice and theory. In this political, social, intellectual and artistic context, this generation questions any inherited knowledge, as it perpetuates male domination. Chicago conceives her career around notions of deficit and disobedience. Her outright rejection of patriarchal rules oppressing women through ideologies that praise their natural inferiority and preach that “biology is destiny” will be what actually make her a radically innovating artist. Chicago wove these deficits into the two main lines around which her work is structured.
Her first line of work is dedicated to the creation of a feminine (and feminist) iconography which represents women, revealing, denouncing, and defying the phallocentrism that operates as a universal male in contemporary visual culture. This line begins with the first works produced by the artist in the early 1960s, in which she highlights the fact that sexual difference, understood as the logic supporting the discrimination, oppression and exploitation of women, is also inscribed in visual culture. During those years in which feminism was incipient in art, the task for the artist was to break the imposed silence and represent the denied identity.
Her second line of work, which interacts with the first, focuses on history. Chicago’s interest in history goes back to her student years, when she realised she was not being taught any female authors in an academic context. She then began a process of researching the history of feminist thought in order to provide a genealogy of women in art and all areas of activity—a pursuit which, especially after 1970, directly informs her work. That year, she implemented her first art education project, the foundations of which were built on feminist awareness, and although at the beginning it was offered to exclusively female groups, a second stage also included men. A large portion of Chicago’s artistic production pays tribute—in some cases even in the form of a monument—to the figures and achievements of women which an androcentric history has denied or minimised.
In a new approach to history, the most recent pieces of this exhibition explore religion and so-called popular culture as if these were historical archives of knowledge—evidencing, in a special way, the richness and complexity of Chicago’s feminist gaze. The feminist gaze is the only “method” of observation of human societies which does not forget that sexual difference is produced in conjunction with the race/ethnicity, class and age. It is a gaze which Chicago proposes at the beginning of the 21st century in order to deepen the redefinition and application of a contemporary human rights agenda.
Echoing the feminist maxim that “the personal is political,” the title of the exhibition, Why Not Judy Chicago?, aims towards transcending the dimension of the personal to approach the issue of the (non) recognition of female, and in particular feminist, artists. At the same time, in its personal dimension, the title of the exhibition also reverberates in the form of another question: Why has one of the legendary pioneers of feminist art, and one of the most popular living artists in the USA, still not received recognition from hegemonic art institutions?
The exhibition programming includes a seminar co-lead by commissioner Xabier Arakistain and feminist anthropologist Lourdes Méndez, with the participation of Judy Chicago in addition to Amelia Jones, Andrew Perchuk, Jane Gerhard and Edward Lucie-Smith.
Why Not Judy Chicago? is a co-production by Azkuna Zentroa and CAPC (Musée d´art Contemporain de Bordeaux), with the collaboration of Penn State University and SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). This exhibition is curated by Xabier Arakistain.
