The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco celebrate pioneering feminist artist Judy Chicago with a retrospective spanning from her early engagement with the Californian Light and Space Movement in the 1960s to her current body of work, a searing investigation of mortality and environmental devastation, begun in 2015. The exhibition includes around 150 works and related archival material that chart the boundary-pushing path of the artist named Cohen by birth and Gerowitz by marriage, who, after trying to fit into the patriarchal structure of the Los Angeles art world, decided to change her name and the course of history.
Judy Chicago: A Retrospective seeks to bring to the fore the continued radicality of Chicago’s practice in terms of both her choice of subject matter and her embrace of media traditionally excluded from the art historical canon, beginning with her investigation of representations of femininity and womanhood. To this day, her art is activist in its foundation. It is an empathetic project driven by the need and desire for social justice and an insistence on aesthetic strategies that don’t require knowledge of art history or critical theory to be legible while being deeply inscribed in both.