The pioneering self-professed 'artist and troublemaker' on six decades of fighting the patriarchy and her first UK retrospective at 84One day in 1982, Judy Chicago visited the Sistine Chapel in Rome and looked up at the 60-foot ceiling to the towering image of“It really aggravated me,” the American artist says, all these years later, with a heavy Midwestern drawl. What bothered her was a patriarchal vision of the creation story that was so contrary to the reality she knew.
It’s a drab afternoon in London’s Serpentine Gallery, but Chicago’s attire is anything but: white hair, metallic-painted nails, yellow and orange-rimmed glasses, and diamanté walking stick. Ditto her conversational swing, which veers from scholastic to rhapsodic. “My generation were taught that there had never been any great women artists,” she tells me.
Central to the concept for her “female Bible” was a challenge to the popular idea of a patriarchal creator. “I began thinking about what it does to women, and our sense of ourselves, to have a male god in all religions,” she says. This profound realisation was borne of her own personal frustration as a woman artist at this time. Only a few years into her professional career in the early 60s, she began feeling increasingly isolated in the Los Angeles art scene, where she was working.
“There’s work in this show that I never thought I’d see exhibited,” she tells me as we discuss the exhibition’s focus on drawing, bringing together archival and never-before-seen artworks, including the drawings she did in the early 80s while watching a friend give birth. Looking at those writhing sketches, I’m reminded of a famous Chicago quip: “If men had babies there would be millions of images of the crowning.
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