Featuring Judy Chicago with Carolee Schneemann, Cindy Sherman, Penny Arcade, Janine Antoni, Lisa Yuskavage, Sara Risk, Judy Fox, and Candice Raquel Lee
(For Bios and More Information about the Artists, Click Here)
"The works in this exhibition reflect almost a quarter century of my career and demonstrate the importance of paper to the development of my iconography - also, a range of techniques which I chose for their specific expressive potential. From the early lithograph "Butterfly Vagina Erotica" to the more recent etchings and reverse aquatints "Nine Fragments from the Delta of Venus", it is possible to trace both my interest in developing a female-centered erotica (all but absent from the art historical record) and drawing as a tool for articulating my ideas. "Butterfly Vagina Erotica" is fairly simple technically; two run lithographs with a rainbow roll (blended color) while "Delta" involved multiple plates on which the negative areas were drawn, an incredibly labor-intensive process. The "Birth Project" prints are complex multi-run, multi-color serigraphs and the "Song of Songs" (created almost 15 years later) combine blended runs of both lithography and helio-relief, a process of working on wood in which I used the grain of different woods for particular visual effects. The drawings that comprise the rest of the show demonstrate a similar type of color blending as evidenced in all the prints, achieved through shaded rendering done with prismacolor pencils, which have to be continually sharpened in order to achieve these effects. All in all, the exhibition reveals my dedication to both process and meaning in art."
Judy Chicago, 2008
JUDY CHICAGO. Butterfly Vagina Erotica: Cover, CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN. Interior Scroll (Vision Archive).
The Approach, The Descent, The Contact, The Throb, 1975/2005. (giclee archival print / orig. photos by Anthony McCall)
1975. (lithograph)
"Feminist principles have completely, irrevocably changed, deepened our cultural history. Within the past twenty-five years, feminist analysis has shifted thousands of years of exclusion and marginalizations, has fueled new relationship models, holistic and ecological awareness, the diversity of religious and aesthetic history, political connections between societal conflicts of class, race, gender, sexuality, as well as the current alarming erosion of our civil liberties
This feminist legacy has sustained my critical analysis and allowed a confirming context for the motives of my work, which struggled in isolation during the 1960's and early 1970's.
My question now is, in what ways has the participation of women-- the degree of our cultural equity-- provoked the hyper-masculine, the dominators, the militarists and renewed the inanities of adolescent male fantasies which dominate our cultural motives? Have our social activations stirred the reactive masculist hornet's nest? In the seemingly free expressivity of this USA moment, our civil liberties, our constitutional rights are being abridged. We face the negation of hard won health care and reproductive rights, military incursions for control of oil resources and the irrevocable dismantling of ecological protections. How do we artists respond to the potential activation of one million citizen spies for the newly legislated U.S.A. "Terrorism and Information Prevention System"?
Younger women artists will find it difficult to comprehend the incalculable resistance and exclusions we experienced. That a belief and dedication to a feminine history of art was despised by those who might have taught it, and considered heretical and false by those who should have taught it. Our deepest energies were nurtured by the precedents of invisible women artists, now confirmed by archeological and ethnological research, as the shapers of pottery, weaving, sculpture, fresco, architecture, astronomy and the laws of medicine, animal "husbandry" and agriculture.
PENNY ARCADE. Bad Reputation (Performarnce Still). Photo by Steve Zehenter.
My work is grounded in my relationship to my own life and to my own sense of history and lineage.
My forms draw from anthropology, photography, and journalism more than they do from a particular art or theatrical form.
My personal art forms developed in the 1980s in what was still then an underground art scene, unaffected and uninfluenced by the marketplace. My manifesto was one of anti-consumerism and was solidly anti-product in the mid-1980s. My basis was that of live art; if you wanted to know my work, you had to see me live. This approach certainly helped me to create a large body of work--focused as I was on process and content rather than on product--but it did little to promote my influence, which easily crept into the mainstream without personally acknowledging or benefiting me.
I believe that we go to art to experience what we are unable or unwilling to experience in real life. Throughout my life, my work has represented the outsider, the other, who I have been my entire life--first as an immigrant Italian child, hopelessly aware that I would never be the All-American girl so popular in America's 1950s. As a child between cultures, I was also keenly aware of other children like me, whether of Polish, Ukranian, Lithuanian, Assyrian, Lebanese, Spanish and, later, Puerto Rican heritage, as well as the children of the black ghetto that bordered my neighborhood and who populated my elementary school and the East End New Britain, Connecticut working class neighborhood where I grew up.
Growing up in 1950s New Britain, it would have been impossible to escape the influence of working class intellectualism, with the strains of anarchism and other outsider political forms that thrived there from the turn of the century to well into the 1970s. Before third grade my awareness of the "other" took in race as well as differing ethnicities and became also grounded in class and race, as Southern Italians do not consider themselves "white"--or certainly didn't in the 1950s. By the age of 12, between the oppressive sexism of working class Italian life, combined with the swift consequences of being perceived as sexual as a young teen girl in a puritan culture (where any charisma not tied into cheerleading and social popularity is viewed with mistrust) I started to add the outsider aspects of sexuality and what it means to not be able to hide one's difference in a world boundaried by the status quo.
At this time I was brought into two diametrically opposed sanctuaries: first was the cloistered world of the nuns of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd at the time of Ecumenical Council, which saw the birth of feminism in convents across the world. I must add that for me, with what I had experienced between my Southern Italian, peasant family and the 1960s street world of the good girl /bad girl and "never the twain shall meet", feminism was not just an option for me but a clear necessity for survival. Next was my introduction to the gay world. Conscious of my bisexuality from an early age, when I first encountered the gay world I discovered that elements that seemed so personal and solitary to me--and which appeared nowhere in any public culture I had encountered--were here in fact, part of the lives, reality, and consciousness of many people. This furthered my inquiry into what it was to be truly alive, to be truly human and to walk my path alone if need be. There in the 1960s gay bars and coffee shops, high and low culture mixed, and the things that marked me as different were exalted: my wit, my outspokenness, my singular point of view, were sought after and valued. The cloister, giving me time to consider and reflect what I had experienced in my life, supported the idea of reading and culture for its own sake and not towards an end of becoming job-ready, and supported the idea that I was more than the class I was born into. The stifling and narrow intellectual dimensions the nuns were fighting worldwide were my enemy too, and a role model for my own liberation. On the other hand, the gay bars and coffee shops of 1960s Hartford, Connecticut, Boston, Provincetown, and then New York, gave me a wide exposure to many mentoring and inspiring people who supported and encouraged my personal powers of observation. I furthered my education through the privilege of living in the demi-monde, the criminal world, as well as spending time in the underclass of America's greatest urban center, New York. My early involvement with John Vaccaro's Playhouse of the Ridiculous, the original rock and roll, political, glitter/glam, queer theatre of N.Y.'s mid- to late-60s as well as my involvement as a Warhol superstar with Andy Warhol 's Factory began my personal trajectory into my own work at the age of 17, both companies employing improvisation as the main motor of creating work. One must remember that while Warhol is considered as quintessentially American as apple pie, he was first and foremost an immigrant Eastern European working class kid with aspirations beyond his class and station in life, so similar to the many gay, Catholic Eastern Bloc kids I encountered in the gay bars of Connecticut. Vaccaro, too, was the son of immigrant Italians from Steubenville, Ohio, like Warhol's Pittsburgh and my New Britain, all from factory towns. Joining the two was the great filmmaker and performance genius Jack Smith, and it was these three who formed my formal education in art, theatre, film and performance.My personal work evolved from storytelling and the re-representation and re-creation of real life events in my performance work which was primarily influenced by both the oral storytelling traditions of my southern Italian family as well as the street corner philosophizing and oral traditions that evolved from America's Southern plantations in the urban black criminal world I experienced as a homeless teen in the 1960s.
I had the great privilege of being tutored and mentored by some of America's greatest artists, not in art school or university but on a daily basis for over 30 years..
I have experienced many diverse realities and I have learned from them--all these experiences contributed to my point of view and strengthened my desire to contribute to the world as the world has contributed to me. I realize I have had an unusual life, and more unusually I have survived to tell the tale. All that I have experienced has fed into my artistic life, as I am not separate from myself as an artist and myself as a human being. This, perhaps, is the very element that sets me and my work apart, my goal being to experience what it is to be truly human and to be truly self-individuated. This has formed my point of view as well as creating the forms I present my work through--the quest for integration and transformation, for myself as well as for the audience.
"I
n 2038 I was thinking about how we are weaned from the mother onto the cow. The cow is our surrogate mother, or better yet, our wet nurse. We drink from her body, but do not know her. Umbilical further comments on the relationship between the mother's body and that of the child. I recently got married, and my mother said to me, "I would be happy to give you our family silverware, but I know you wouldn't have time to clean it." I began to think that at first I fed from my mother's body, then from her hand, and now she would like to pass down the utensils to feed others. The silver spoon is an object that speaks of domesticity and the ritualization of a basic need. In Umbilical, the cast of the negative space at one end of the spoon is of my adult mouth, and at the other end is the space inside of my mother's hand. For me, Umbilical encapsulates the longing or desire to return to the mother. Feeling disconnected from the cow, I made 2038 to reestablish that relationship. Showing these works together acknowledges the mother and the cow as providers."
JANINE ANTONI. Umbilical, 2007. (sterling silver cast of family silverware)
Sara Risk
SARA RISK. Self-portrait, 1995. (charcoal & pastel)
Sara, whose struggles with anorexia and bulimia manifest themselves in the poignant and moving pieces of art presented in this show, died in 1998. The artist statements below are fragments from past shows.
For me, the making of art is contemplation and affirmation of the power of the unseen. It is an active prayer. To say one’s Gods, so to speak, renders them near, and is a causal act which effects as spiritual refinement. Painting is a way for me to satisfy my compulsion towards the Holy.
Some have been created to commemorate deceased, and living, loved ones. By rendering visible through paint or charcoal, it is hoped that the character, the soul, of the person depicted is revealed and honored. Other works seem to bespeak of, to attest to, the hard endured, but endured, Journey.
Judy Fox
For decades I've been working on a series of life size nudes that are revisions of heroes and stereotypes. I have combined two western traditions- that of symbolic character statuary and that of the modernist nude. The combination is unsettling. The figures look like naked individuals challenged to hold iconic poses- or like icons stripped to the psychological core.
My careful rendering is traditional, in that I show beautiful curves of gesture. But I also display the physical idiosyncrasies of real bodies. With this combination of ideal gesture and real proportion I try to convey a longing for beauty, the critical self-consciousness that pervades our contemporary body ethos.
The Venus figure is modeled after a prehistoric carved figurine, a corpulent woman with her face obscured by some kind of wrapping. Like her prototype, Venus balances upon diminutive ankles, her palms pressed carefully above her breasts. I don't know what this pose signified 20,000 years ago, but here it seems to evoke eons of precarious feminine power: nurturing, sensual, mysterious, threatening. It must be revered and constrained.
Vanity, on the other hand, abandons the decorum of the figure. This creature is one of a surrealist grouping (The Seven Sins) that flamboyantly depicts internal drives, in both the physiological and psychological sense. Familiar visceral forms and sensations cavort in public--improper perhaps, but familiar, and ultimately, one hopes, endearing.
"Female Forms and Facets" - Artist Statement - December 2007
JUDY FOX. Vanity, 2007. (terra cotta & casein) CANDICE RAQUEL LEE. Pythia, 2008. (cast stone)
Candice Raquel Lee
Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world. --Joseph Campbell
"My sculptures embody my belief in the importance of reviving myth for contemporary society. Specifically, my work is bound to the notion that art in general and my sculpture in particular can reawaken the acceptance of sexual equality, empowered women, and harmonious gender relations held by some ancient cultures, as discussed by scholars Riane Eisler, Joseph Campbell, Robert Graves and others.
My treatment of myth invites viewers to reassess initial impressions grounded in a conventional 'male' eye that perceives female bodies as passively and necessarily sexual. Initial reactions to Lilith's Flight, for instance, tend to see it as solely erotic. Yet, further examination of the sculpture and awareness of the narrative context which is always essential to my work overturns these culturally conditioned perceptions in favor of a feminist message. Lilith's Flight freezes the precise moment when Adam's mythic first wife Lilith, refusing to be sexually dominated, utters the mystical name of God and escapes to the skies. In so doing, the work evokes the complex relations between the sexes while calling for communication and equality between men and women.
Pythia, who is also known as the Sybil (later, of Delphi) similarly partakes in a narrative context that hearkens back to a time of female power. While the patriarchal conception of women often sees them as physical beings or as muses who inspire men, Pythia is a female prophet herself inspired by the whisperings of the snake-God from whom she receives true knowledge. She is thus the positive antithesis of Eve. When she looks at and within herself with her oracular vision, she sees the divine and understands the future. In this, her insight contrasts the shallow gaze of those who would see her as just a nude female body.
My two heavenly goddesses, Rosy-Fingered Dawn and Iris, Goddess of the Rainbow, also seek to challenge conventional sculpted representations of women by placing them in positions of divinity usually occupied by an old bearded man in the sky. Dawn has a casual power. Though she is reclining sensually, she is bringing up the sun simply by awakening and stretching. Power is intrinsic to her; it is part of her very being. Her beauty too is natural and awesome, like that of the rising sun, not something to be covered over in shame and a force that resists dismissive sexualization.
This feminine power is more forcefully depicted in Iris, Goddess of the Rainbow. Unlike Rodin's Iris: Messenger of the Gods, which is essentially a headless female body exposing herself to the (presumably male) viewer, I sought to put my Iris in a more becoming pose, better suited to her status as woman and goddess. Although she is confident in her sexuality, her pose is neither graphic nor gratuitous, but woman-centered in its strength. As an arch--one of the strongest structural shapes--she flexes easily to the limit of physical possibility with the ease of a contortionist but does not break, just as women bend under the load of oppression and great responsibilities without breaking. Iris rests casually with hands folded under her chin, reinventing the classic pose of a 50s pin-up as something of power. She is not merely a sexual muse for men like Rodin's Iris, but is, like my other sculptures, a complex embodiment of all that is feminine: a symbol of hope for women and a beacon for men--a rainbow after bleak storms."