Where Are We Now? The Judy Chicago Interview
by the Artsy Collective

Judy Chicago has made a notable mark on feminist art history as both an artist and an educator. As an artist, she is perhaps best known for her early work "The Dinner Party", a triangular table set for a celebratory banquet of 39 historical and mythical women figures. Each woman's name is reverently stitched onto the cloth of her place setting, and upon each plate is painted a butterfly-like vulvic design. The table is only large enough to accomodate a few, so 999 more names are embroidered onto the floor drapery. A symphony of female artisans was employed to undertake the crafting of this monumental work, which Chicago humorously describes as "a reinterpretation of the Last Supper as told from the point of view of those who have done the cooking throughout history."

Britta Eberle: How have you seen the feminist movement work and how have you seen it fail?

Judy Chicago: Well, what's worked is that things are definitely different for young women artists than they were when I was your age. At that time... people used to say that you can't be a woman and an artist too. And there was certainly no possibility of making art that was woman-centered, which is what I set out to change. And there's no question now that there's a lot of woman-centered art being made by younger female artists. However, that's the good news. The bad news is that the goals of the feminist art movement and the women's art movement in general have not been achieved- I mean, to really transform the world. I hear way too many stories of how, still, women are educated without even knowing much about women's history. They go to art school and still don't know anything about women artists. So the institutionalization of those changes has not occurred at a significant enough level.

Donald Woodman (Judy's husband, in the background):That's true!

Julia Laricheva: My question is, how did you first start to get shows? Did you send slides out like all the other artists?

JC: No- well, I came up during a totally different time. I came up prior to the international art market. I was in Los Angeles at the time- I was extremely fortunate in terms of the timing. I was in graduate school, and the art world was really being shaped in L.A. They were starting to bring in artists from New York and Europe, and there was an effort to create a professional art scene. In order to do that, critics and curators were looking for young artists to kind of promote as a way to promote the vitality of the art scene, so I was showing by the time that I was in graduate school. Even though it was contentious and I had to fight to be taken seriously, still there were opportunities. Nevertheless, a lot of the women that I came up with in art school were completely eclipsed.

BE: Generally, for those just beginning and those who have been in the business for years, what do you feel is challenging about being a woman artist today?

JC: Well, for women just starting out, and mid-career artists, the problems are totally different. For young female artists just starting out, probably one of the challenges is to not be deluded by the changes that have taken place in the art world, because they have taken place primarily at the entry level.... There have been studies done on the exhibition policies of museums. There was just one done on the west coast institutions—what is apparent is that the lower the level of the institution, the more women are shown. The higher the level of the institution, the less women are shown—except in group shows. In terms of collecting policies and major exhibitions, when you get into the significant institutions the change has been very, very minor. But it's math—by the fact that there are all these smaller community-based alternative spaces, smaller institutions are where lots of women are showing, sometimes as many as fifty percent of the exhibitions. So one thing that I would caution young women about is to not be deluded by those statistics, which they actually are being—they actually think that we live in a post-feminist age, that feminism is quaint. There's a reason why I am not quite as pissed-off about that—it's that I myself went through that when I was young. I did not want to identify myself with other women. I didn't understand why you should call yourself a woman artist, why I should even want to. Then I woke up. However, one of my own goals is to not have women sacrifice 10-20 years of their career before they wake up. I can't make that happen single-handedly.

In terms of mid-career artists, I know many who are bitter and angry because their awards have not kept up with their achievement and they have actually been erased. So that's a different kind of a challenge- a challenge to keep working and not to become bitter, a challenge to be productive and keep finding ways of trying to get your work out into the world.