Judy Chicago: Revelations at Serpentine Gallery

At the age of 84, the pioneering American feminist artist Judy Chicago has lost none of her desire to use her work as a platform for demanding an end to patriarchal injustices, be they in the art world or society as a whole. In a six-decade career that has periodically seen her shunned, pilloried and chastised by parts of the art industry, Chicago has thrown into sharp relief how women have often been erased from cultural history. Over the years, there have been recurring themes of power and oppression, toxic masculinity, human birth and an enduring awareness of climate change. Now, after a three-year delay imposed by COVID-19, Revelations opens at Serpentine North, the artist’s largest-ever London exhibition. It is dubbed with the name of a hitherto unpublished manuscript she created in the 1970s when working on her iconic installation, The Dinner Party.

In a candid and at times emotional speech at the press opening of the new exhibition, Chicago mentioned how the Serpentine’s Artistic Director, Hans Ulrich Obrist, had expressed his belief upon viewing the Revelations manuscript for the first time that it was “foundational to (her) entire practice”.

Written and illustrated by the artist in the 1970s, the biblically titled manuscript – in essence, a feminist reimagining of the Bible – was hidden away in her studio drawer for half a century. Now, it has been published by the Serpentine and Thames and Hudson in conjunction with the exhibition.

The five chapters of the manuscript have provided the framework for Serpentine’s North’s show, Obrist and his team setting out to focus on the long-term role drawing has played in Chicago’s practice. In the Beginning (1982), a nine-metre canvas at the entrance to the current show emerged from her Birth Project series in the 1980s. Rendered in Prismacolor pencils – something of a signature for the artist – the piece represented a reimagining of the biblical Genesis narrative from a female perspective at a time when Chicago had been appalled by the lack of depictions of birth in the Western art canon. The universe is shown born from a woman’s labours, set against a black background, quite at odds with Michelangelo’s vision of the creation of humanity in the Sistine Chapel she had visited that same year.     

Born Judy Cohen into a Jewish household, the woman who would become an icon of feminist art would be inspired by the women’s liberation movement in 1970 to change from Gerowitz, her marital name, to the name of her birthplace, Chicago. That same year she founded the first Feminist Art Programme at California State University. The Serpentine’s current show, which amounts to a retrospective, starts with Revelations of the Goddess featuring sensitive works on paper from the late 60s to the 70s. The emotively coloured forms in Through the Flower (1972) are redolent of the female body. As her career unfolds, one finds the artist developing a distinctive, bold style bearing the hallmarks of graphic posters and often assertively symbolic.

Chicago’s most famous work, The Dinner Party (1974-79) is regarded as now simply too fragile to travel across the Atlantic from its permanent home in the Brooklyn Museum. This multimedia installation takes the form of a triangular banqueting table with places set for 39 historical women or goddesses whose impact the artist sought to restore in the face of patriarchal neglect. Each setting includes porcelain plates, all – save two depicting elaborately styled vulvar forms – floor tiles mentioning 999 other influential women. Unable to display the original, the Serpentine have Judy Chicago’s film, which sheds light on those heroines’ identities whilst also telling the story of the nearly 400 female collaborators who helped bring the work to fruition. On the gallery’s walls are banners and sketchbooks where one finds floral and butterfly forms that were regular motifs in her work during the period. Another film captures Republican politician Robert Dornan condemning The Dinner Party as “ceramic three-dimensional pornography” in a 1990 House of Representatives debate.

Elsewhere, other films testify to Chicago’s challenging of artistic and societal boundaries. Her 1968-1974 Atmospheres, immersive, site-specific performances were ephemeral works using smoke and pyrotechnics to blend with the environment, quite at odds with male-dominated Land Art’s tendency to reshape nature – Robert Smithson coming to mind. For decades, Chicago has condemned humanity’s destruction of the planet. Her series Powerplay (1982-87) sees the subversion of traditional depictions of masculinity. One particularly crude Prismacolor on paper shows a naked male figure literally Pissing on Nature (1982). Study for Driving the World to Destruction #2 (1983) has a giant man driving the Earth into ruin. A more recent piece from 2013, Stranded, depicts a forlorn polar bear gripping onto a disintegrating iceberg.

Chicago has long sought inspiration from mythological sources: the Primordial Goddess of The Dinner Party comes to mind. Through female deity iconography, she has imagined alternative historical narratives for women. As this exhibition enters its final furlong, one finds her series Birth Project (1980-85). Consisting of 85 works made collaboratively with over 100 needleworkers, these combine painting with needle techniques, focussing on the act of labour, motherhood and creation. The Female Divine, conceived in 1977 was brought into gargantuan reality in the form of a 250-foot-long goddess – a collaborative project with Dior for their Spring-Summer 2020 Haute Couture show in Paris. The structure was lined with hanging banners with appliqued and hand-embroidered questions asking how different society would be with female political and spiritual leaders (ignoring the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel).

Those questions provided the stimulus for Chicago’s monumental quilt What If Women Ruled the World? A global response project featuring artist, activist and Pussy Riot member, Nadya Tolokonnikova, the work encourages contributors to share their views on gender equality and aspirations for a better world. A recent new drawing made for the manuscript, And God Created Life (2023) brings this exhibition to a conclusion with the artist challenging the traditional idea of God being male by depicting a figure of no particular gender.

The flames of activism still burn inside this pioneering feminist icon. Men and the patriarchy take a bit of a battering throughout but Chicago continues to also throw her energies into promoting environmental action. In 2020 she joined forces with Jane Fonda and her environmental initiative Fire Drill Friday to launch #CreateArtforEarth, to prompt art that addresses the climate crisis. Visitors to the Serpentine are encouraged to contribute art or messages. What impresses here is the sheer range of techniques Chicago has explored in the pursuit of her goals. There’s anger, satire and passionate calls for change aplenty and no little conjecture to be had in this consistently absorbing show.

James White
Image: Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photo: Donald Woodman/ARS, NY

Judy Chicago: Revelations is at Serpentine Gallery from 23^rd May until 1^st September 2024. For further information visit the exhibition’s website here.