Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago is an artist, author, and teacher, who had a leading role in establishing the 1970s Feminist Art Movement in America. She received a BA (1962) and MA (1964) in Fine Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In the 1970s, she co-founded the Feminist Art Program at California State University, Fresno, with Miriam Schapiro. They collaborated with hundreds of volunteers to create the monumental feminist art installation, The Dinner Party (1974–79). This multimedia exploration of the history of women in Western Civilisation is now included in most standard texts about the development of twentieth-century art. Since The Dinner Party, collaborative art-making has been a characteristic feature of her practice. She works across a wide variety of media, including performance, painting, drawing, ceramic, glass, printmaking, and sculpture, often using a combination of media, geometric forms, and spectral colours, to communicate a sense of pride in the feminine body and spirit. Her six decades of professional practice has been the subject of several retrospectives.
Voices from the Song of Songs (2000) is a suite of twelve prints illustrating verses from the Old Testament book, the Song of Songs (also known as the Song of Solomon). Dating from the tenth century BCE, the verses are a collection of love poems in which different voices (a woman, a man, and a collective) celebrate love and union.
There have been many translations of the Song of Songs, but Judy Chicago based her illustrations on the work of poet and painter Marcia Falk, which she selected due to its emphasis on ‘mutuality of desire, something that is sorely lacking in the history of erotic art which is traditionally from a male point of view’. The sexual ambiguity of the work’s subjects eliminates any clear hierarchy, suggesting a shared experience of pleasure.
By collaborating with skilled printmakers, Chicago was able to combine Helio relief (a photomechanical process for woodcut printing) with lithography. She chose this media for its expressive potential, with its wood-grain pattern from the Helio relief contrasting with the untextured lithography for added effect. The resulting simplicity of the works reflect the gentle eroticism and equality celebrated in the poems.
Further Reading
Chicago, Judy. The dinner party: from creation to preservation. London: Merrell, 2007.
Chicago, Judy. The flowering: the autobiography of Judy Chicago. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2021.
Lucie-Smith, Edward. Judy Chicago: an American vision. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 2000.
Selected Collections
British Museum
Centre Pompidou
Tate Britain
