Judy Chicago’s Birth Tear/Tear, part of the artist’s “Birth Project.”

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When Women Rule the World: Judy Chicago in Thread
Glenbow Museum
Tuesday, September 29 - Tuesday, September 29

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Pink sunglasses, flowery vulvas and boxing gloves are some of the images you might equate with Judy Chicago, an impression she consciously crafted. She has used flagrantly feminist imagery as her personal iconography consistently throughout her 40-year career as an artist. She also invented it.

When she first started making art in the early ’70s, Chicago was pioneering the feminist movement with only a few others. There were virtually no images made by women about their unique experience as women, though there was no shortage of phallic shapes. Although the early feminine symbols and trademarks she developed seem trite, crude or even limiting compared to our contemporary awareness of femininity in all its diversity, we would be lost without Chicago’s groundbreaking steps towards equality for women.

Chicago’s first work examining a place for women in visual culture and in Western history was The Dinner Party, made between 1974 and 1979 and involving over 400 collaborators and craftspeople. The piece is a triangular table with unique place settings consisting of a ceramic plate, embroidered tablecloth and chalice for 39 historical or mythical women. It garnered widespread attention and controversy for putting women’s issues on such a monumental scale, and also for the hand-painted ceramic plates that reference the forms of butterflies, opening flowers and, of course, vaginas.

The piece was barred by many art venues across North America. In 1982, while it was being refused at venues here in Calgary, a group of women stepped forward to have the piece shown at the Glenbow.

“It was one of the largest turnouts to an exhibition in Glenbow’s history and it was actually held over into 1983,” says Marianne Elder, the Art Gallery of Calgary’s senior curator. “And from what I’ve heard there were lineups around the block to go in and see it.”

Now, the first major survey of Chicago’s textile works, spanning four decades and including over 30 pieces, is coming to the Art Gallery of Calgary (AGC). Organized by AGC CEO and president Valerie Cooper and the former director of the Textile Museum of Canada, Nataley Nagy, the exhibition will be called “When Women Rule the World.”

Textile arts have been at the core of Chicago’s practice since she realized their historical roles in the everyday lives of women as well as their inherent group participation. Her large-scale embroidery, crochet and quilted projects bring hundreds of women together to talk about social issues, forming a community of support and creating a lasting piece that leads to broader social change.

Elder hopes that the strong social messages in Chicago’s work will get people talking in the space. “Whenever we put an exhibition on, regardless of what it is and especially if it’s a little more difficult, one of our hugest mandates is education,” she says.

Elder has worked closely with Chicago to bring smaller scale works that did not show at the Textile Museum of Canada to the AGC’s top gallery. The Interpretive Centre will be full of didactic panels made by Chicago and her needle workers to let the public in on the lengthy, collaborative and highly skilled process of creating a tapestry.

The AGC is also set to host a larger than usual amount of educational programs for “When Women Rule the World.” The programs were supported in part by Chicago’s donation to the gallery of 50 per cent of the profits made from two of her test plates from The Dinner Party, which were purchased at a value of $450,000 US by a newly formed group of Calgary women called ARTdivas Inc. Highlights of the programs include a gallery tour with tapestry weaver and longtime Chicago collaborator, Audrey Cowan, as well as weaving and felting workshops for adults.

There is also a sister exhibition at the AGC called “She Will Always Be Younger Than Us,” curated by feminist scholar and artist Allyson Mitchell. This group show consists of five young feminist artists working with textiles and other media, including local artist Wednesday Lupypciw, who have been influenced by Chicago’s work and career.

The retrospective nature of Chicago’s exhibition holds the incredible value of being able to examine a woman’s entire career as an artist, not to mention the fact that this woman has been called the very mother of feminist art. While her earlier works were more singularly aimed at feminist and sexual politics, such as “The Birth Project,” her subsequent works focus on broader and more global issues of power, community and human rights.

“People may look at her older work as her ‘strong work’ with a very definite, strong voice,” says Elder. With a background in gender theory, queer theory and feminist history, Elder questions whether the move from academic to populist artwork is simply what happens to a feminist artist in her practice over a period of 40 years.

The differences between low and high art are something Elder has given a lot of thought to recently. She doesn’t know how AGC’s various audiences will react to the show but is looking forward to those conversations

“Whether your opinion of her work is that it’s cliché or trite or that it’s more universal and speaks to more people, therefore engaging broader audiences, I think there is a discussion to be had,” she says. “I don’t think we should be afraid to have that discussion in the space.”

Many of the works created for “The Birth Project” focus on the female body and female iconography previously unrepresentable or unspoken in a culture that ignored the private knowledge of women, their desires and the experience of childbirth. Chicago refuses to compromise the honesty of birth or bodily images. If images of embryos, natural forms and child-bearing figures seem painfully obvious and cliché to contemporary art audiences, perhaps its because there is still some difficulty in confronting such private and unhindered expression. It may further indicate that women’s sense of self is, in spite of everything we think, controlled, compromised or manipulated today.