Judy Chicago: A Reckoning

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami presents “Judy Chicago: A Reckoning”, a major survey of works by the pioneering feminist artist. This exhibition highlights Chicago’s iconographic transition from abstraction to figuration, and explores the ways in which the artist’s strong feminist voice transforms our understanding of modernism and its traditions.

Representing the female voice in a male-dominated world, Chicago explores important narratives of history, form and labor. The artist deploys both iconography and working methods in order to problematize gender roles, artistic mastery and skills traditionally regarded as “female” such as needlework and embroidery, as well as stereotypical “male” skills, such as auto body painting and pyrotechnics.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Image: Judy Chicago, Birth Hood (1965/2011). © Judy Chicago/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © Donald Woodman/ARS NY. Courtesy Salon 94, New York, and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

Whether or not you go, the companion publication, Judy Chicago: A Reckoning, traces Chicago's career from her emergence on the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s through her mature work in the 1990s. Featuring illustrations of six distinct bodies of works, this book includes Chicago's masterpiece The Dinner Party as well as other lesser-known works. With informative essays that situate Chicago's oeuvre in the context of contemporary Southern Californian art and scholarship that reflects Chicago's current work, this comprehensive book provides a breathtaking look at one of the quintessential figures of American feminist art.

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