Judy Chicago’s Birth Project: Born Again

Between 1980 and 1985, artist Judy Chicago (b. 1939) and a team of 150 female needleworkers completed eighty-four textile and needle media works that analyzed the interrelationships among motherhood, maternity, femaleness, and gender. Chicago’s subsequent book, The Birth Project, catalogued the artworks and their production and sought to reveal birth as spiritual and intellectual, a source of potent myth and symbol. The project included images of childbirth that afforded a vision seldom seen in western culture since the Neolithic Age, when women embodied creation itself as well as the many manifestations of individual creation, yet it also showed birth as physical and real.

This exhibition reassembles approximately fifteen of the most exceptional Birth Project works, examining both past and present attitudes towards female empowerment and sexuality and underscoring Chicago’s redefinition of the terms art and craft.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.