The Chicago Resolutions

Art in America, June, 2000 by Paula Harper

Veteran artist Judy Chicago spearheads a new collaborative painting-and-needlework series that proposes seven fundamental values for a multicultural society.

Judy Chicago's new collaborative project, "Resolutions for the Millennium: A Stitch in Time," opened on May 31 at the American Craft Museum in New York. It's an appropriate venue for an artist who, as part of her feminist crusade against established hierarchies, has worked to dissolve the divisions between art and craft and between artist and artisan.

Chicago has applied her phenomenal energy and focus to these issues since she first began to attract media coverage in the early '70s with Womanhouse, an installation and performance piece which she created with Miriam Schapiro and their female students in the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts.(1) Since then, as part of her impressively productive life in art, she has published a total of eight books: two autobiographies, Through the Flower in 1975 and Beyond the Flower in 1996; four books that document and explain The Dinner Party, her famous installation piece of 1979; and one each on the "Birth Project" and the "Holocaust Project," two more recent bodies of work. She sees writing as a crucial part of her determined effort to bring her art and ideas to the public and guarantee a place for her work in the written record of history. With Edward Lucie-Smith, the British art historian, Chicago has coauthored a substantial illustrated survey called Women and Art: Contested Territory (New York, Watson-Guptill, 1999) that examines images of women through the ages by both men and women. A monograph about her life and art appeared in May (Judy Chicago: An American Vision, New York, Watson-Guptill), in which Lucie-Smith analyzes Chicago as a visionary artist, and not simply a feminist icon. He views her as particularly American, and suggests not only the predictable predecessor Georgia O'Keeffe but the less expected Thomas Hart Benton. Lucie-Smith notes that both Benton and Chicago make use of "high" and "low" forms and that Benton, in a way similar to Chicago, reinvented European modernism to serve new political and social purposes for an audience in the American heartland.

The Dinner Party, Chicago's project to "teach women's history through art,"(2) has reached a broad segment of the public since it debuted at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It is included in most survey textbooks of world art history as the preeminent feminist work of the 1970s.(3) As evidence of its far-flung fame, a unit on The Dinner Party is incorporated into the curriculum of all fifth-grade classes in New Zealand. Yet a major part of Chicago's audience is not drawn from those who count contemporary art among their primary interests. In the 27-page bibliography of articles written about her since 1969, only a tiny number have appeared in the national art magazines (among them Art in America, which published two articles on The Dinner Party, in 1980 and 1991(4)). The great majority are features or reports/reviews in national and local newspapers, general-interest magazines, women's magazines, Jewish publications, academic journals and certain art magazines that focus on ceramics, fiber and stained glass. As another indicator of the nature of her public, the shows that have traveled, including the current retrospective of works on paper, "Judy Chicago. Trials and Tributes," circulate mainly at college and university galleries, community centers, Jewish centers in the case of the "Holocaust Project," and hospitals and medical centers in the case of the "Birth Project."(5) Chicago has developed an alternative institutional structure to support her work, a cultural phenomenon that has remained for the most part invisible to the mainstream gallery/museum/publicity network.

In the 1999 series "Resolutions," Chicago continues to address the audience she has created of mainly middle- and working-class women, an audience easily dismissed by both highbrows and lowbrows. The 20 images combine Chicago's sprayed acrylic and oil painting with needlework executed by the 16 members of a cooperative group assembled by the artist as the enterprise evolved over five years, beginning in 1994. The ensemble includes an iconic figure sculpture designed by Chicago and executed by a New Mexico woodcarver, Michael Snodgrass. Also on display are sketches, drawings and samples on fabric of the different kinds of stitches, which viewers can handle, along with photographs and text documenting the collaborative process used to develop the pieces.

The "Resolutions" team initially included women from the informal network of needleworkers who stayed in touch with each other after participating in The Dinner Party and/or the "Birth Project." Audrey Cowan, from Los Angeles, who has worked with Chicago since the mid-'70s, and Jane Thompson, from Houston, who has collaborated since 1981, helped to recruit and organize other needleworkers willing to make a long-term commitment to completing "Resolutions." For her part, Chicago guided and supervised the project in addition to designing the images that would showcase the strengths of each participant and expand the esthetic and expressive possibilities of their individual needlework techniques.(6) The stitchers display dazzling skill and finesse, creating textured surfaces of petit point, needlepoint, beading, embroidery, applique, smocking and macrame. In Chicago's wider strategy, such "women's work" is lifted from its traditional place among the minor arts by association with a complex, public project on major themes. In turn, the public statement of "Resolutions" arises from the accumulation of personal experiences. Stitched into each image is not only the worker's patient labor over hundreds of hours, but also, if less tangibly so, her meditation on the values expressed by each image.