Judy Chicago’s Fertile Feminist World

Judy Chicago, a spearhead in feminist art, has devoted decades to celebrating the female experience.

Born Judith Cohen, she legally changed her surname to Chicago in 1970—an act asserting her independence from marital or ancestral ties and a nod to her birthplace.

During her studies at UCLA in the 1960s, she responded to the male-dominated art world by dedicating herself to an artistic practice centred on her belief that the 'female experience could be construed to be every bit as central to the larger human condition as is the male'.

'I left L.A. to start to try and figure out how to create a feminist art practice and to start working with young women in the hopes of helping them be able to make art where they didn't have to deny their gender like I did,' the artist told Ocula Magazine.

Now, at 84 years old, she opens her retrospective, Revelations (23 May–1 September 2024), at London's Serpentine North Gallery.

The exhibition features rarely seen drawings, paintings, sketchbooks, photographs, and films, along with a manuscript written by Chicago in the early 1970s, which is being shown publicly for the first time. Bearing the same title as the exhibition, the manuscript, which the artist produced while creating her seminal work The Dinner Party (1974–1979), is Chicago's retelling of history imagining a fair and equal world.

Serpentine North is filled with works that flaunt Chicago's distinctive psychedelic style. Among them are paintings depicting women giving birth, such as In the Beginning, from Birth Project (1982), characterised by colourful ombre shades contrasted with white outlines that appear to glow against a black backdrop.

Abstract flower works, like Peeling Back (1974), hint at vulva imagery, emerging from rippling patterns that create the illusion they are pulsating. While films and photographs like Smoke Bodies from Women and Smoke (1971–1972) portray goddess-like figures enveloped in multi-coloured clouds of smoke, which soften the rugged California landscape surrounding them.

Main image: Judy Chicago, Wrestling with the Shadow for Her Life from Shadow Drawings (1982). Prismacolour on rag paper. 73.66 x 58.42 cm. © Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Serpentine Galleries, London. Photo: © Donald Woodman.