Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago (born July 20, 1939) is an American feminist artist, author, and educator.

• Art without content is like sex without intimacy: technically sufficient, but emotionally empty.
  • Describing modernism and formalism in an interview with Ann Stubbs on New York City's WBAI (1981)

• As we know, by and large women's life experience has not been represented. It has been men's life experience that has made up the body of art history. At least, as we know it now; and there are all these categories and words that diminish women's expression. So that if it's done by a man, it's "high art"; if it's done by a woman, it's "decorative". If it's done by a man, it's "art"; if it's done by a woman, it's "political". There's all these words, you know? For example, images by men, of women are "art"; images by women of men are "political". Abstract patterns by men are "art"; abstract patterns by women in fabric are "decorative"; they're called quilts. So there's all these kind of double standards and all these kind of words that prevent women's experience from entering—even when they express it—from entering the mainstream of art.
  • In an interview with Ann Stubbs on New York City's WBAI (1981)

• At a certain point power becomes very frightening, and to really begin to reconstruct civilization means to really act in a powerful way. And power is the thing that women have been taught is a real taboo.
  • In an interview with Ann Stubbs on New York City's WBAI (1981)

• The history of art is that there have been alot of artists who have always been socially engaged and art comes out of both a desire to define the meaning of life and a kind of rage and railing against human limitations.
  • In an interview with Ann Stubbs on New York City's WBAI (1981)

• Because we are denied knowledge of our history, we are deprived of standing upon each other's shoulders and building upon each other's hard earned accomplishments. Instead we are condemned to repeat what others have done before us and thus we continually reinvent the wheel. The goal of The Dinner Party is to break this cycle.
  • Reported in Louise Bernikow, The American Women's Almanac: An Inspiring and Irreverent Women's History (1997), p. 185.

• A similar kind of confusion can be found in the attitude Judy Chicago (born in 1939) brought to one of the most ambitious works concerned with the Holocaust, her Holocaust Project, completed in 1992. From the way in which she explains her understanding of the Holocaust, about which she admits that as late as 1984 she "knew almost nothing," one does not know if she has ever separated the Holocaust itself from other kinds of victimization. For example, she says: "In exploring the Holocaust, I was learning about the tragic ways Jews had been victimized, and this eventually linked up with my understanding of women's oppression. I realized that part of what had led me to the Holocaust was a deep, though previously unarticulated interest in "the victim" experience and that my previous investigation of the ways women had been treated historically provided me with an unusual frame of reference for examining the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. . . . I began to perceive that the unique experience of the Holocaust could be a window into an aspect of the unarticulated but universal human experience of victimization"...My problem with Chicago is the way one set of atrocities dissolves into another without qualification, as if they are all equal.
  • Matthew Baigell Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust (1997)

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