Judy Chicago: Earth

Judy Chicago, born in 1939, has devoted her life to equality and justice. Though she first came to be known as an artist activist fighting for equanimity for women in the art world, that is only one of several aspects of Chicago’s six-decade preoccupation with justice in her artworks. In addition to her iconic feminist projects such as "The Dinner Party" and "Birth Project," Chicago has tackled themes relating to human, environmental, and animal rights, as well.

Chicago has bathed the landscape in nurturing colored "Atmospheres," and celebrated the Earth with pyrotechnic and firework performances since the late 1960s. Her massive "Purple Atmosphere" was first performed in Santa Barbara in 1969, and her "Bouquet for Belen" celebrated her 80th birthday in 2019. Upcoming pyrotechnic works are scheduled for Berlin and her retrospective at the de Young Museum in San Francisco next year.

When Chicago first started her performative works like "Atmospheres" and "Women in Smoke," she was the only woman artists in the earth art genre. Art critics simply didn’t know what to make of her radically innovative works. Tragically, for years they dismissed it. As is sometimes the case with artists whose brilliance is years ahead of society’s ability to comprehend it, Chicago sought new materials such as photography, video and print, to reiterate her most important messages. Only now, fifty years later, is the gargantuan significance of her atmospheres and "Women and Smoke" works like those included in this exhibition and honoring the Earth, fully comprehensible.

Chicago’s 1990s project titled "Resolutions: A Stitch in Time," her "Rainbow Warrior" poster for Greenpeace, her 2000s projects Kitty City and "The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction," and her latest and largest collaborative project titled #CreateArtForEarth are all attempts to influence our civilization to embrace a more equitable future for human, animal, and planetary coexistence. Chicago’s artistic voice has at times been loud because it had to be to grab attention for urgent causes. Now her voice is the voice of wisdom gained from time on Earth and we need to seek it out. This exhibition offers us a chance to take in images from the whole span of Chicago’s vast career, and finally fully digest her overarching call for us to take care of all living beings, whether plant, animal, or human.

Tonya Turner Carroll
Santa Fe, New Mexico
2020