On The Issues Magazine provides an Online forum for artists to exhibit their art, including moving images and audio, as well as stills. This art section presents exciting responses to major themes of our day.
This edition of On the Issues Magazine presents a mini-retrospective of the gutsy and groundbreaking art of feminist icon Judy Chicago. Click on “Play” to view the art and hear audio descriptions by Judy Chicago about her work.
Judy Chicago (born 1939) is a feminist artist, educator and author whose career spans almost half a century. She is known as one of the founders of the Feminist Art Movement, creating in the early 1970s the pioneering Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College (now California State University), which became a vehicle for intellectual stimulation and social change, influencing generations of women.
Her most well known work is The Dinner Party, a multi-media collaborative installation honoring the achievements of women in Western civilization. It is on permanent view at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.
As described in an interview with Elizabeth Sackler in On The Issues Magazine, this installation, created from 1974-1979, was an homage to 39 women from history and mythology with individualized “place settings” for each on a 48-foot triangular table. This work initially created a furor because of its vulval imagery in some of the ceramic plates. Over the years, however, it has solidified Chicago’s place as a feminist leader in today’s art world.
Chicago’s other major works include The Birth Project (1980-1985), and The Holocaust Project: From Darkness to Light with Donald Woodman.
Chicago is the author of 12 books, most recently, Frida Kahlo: Face to Face, written with Frances Borzello. A biography by Gail Levin, Becoming Judy Chicago, was published in 2007.
Chicago’s work can be found in numerous museum collections. In 2002 the National Museum of Women in the Arts presented a major solo exhibition of her work, and in 2010, the traveling exhibition, Setting the Table: Preparing Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, premiered at the Evansville Museum in Indiana prior to a tour in the U.S. and abroad. Chicago is represented by ACA Galleries in New York.
Linda Stein is the Art Editor of On The Issues Magazine. She begins a three-year traveling exhibition of her art in Iowa in September 2010.
Also visit our catalog of Art Perspectives featuring:
Ursula O’Farrell is a California-based artist whose oil paintings explore themes of womanhood. Her work offers expressions of the feminine in large-scale paintings known for their bold colors, gestural strokes, thick textures and highly-charged emotional content.
The Guerrilla Girls is a group of artists – not always the same — who work together. They are feminist masked avengers in the tradition of anonymous do-gooders like Robin Hood, Wonder Woman and Batman, but their “cover” is the mask of a gorilla — itself a play on the word “guerrilla” as a radical, underground fighter and street theater performance style. Each participant takes the name of a dead artist.
For years, Frances Jetter has made linocuts with political subject matter, focusing on disarmament, labor rights and human rights, about which she is passionate. Weapons seem especially horrific and intriguing to her. The artist believes that no armor can make people safe, and the fragility and mortality of human beings is at the center or her work.
Mary Miss, who has founded the City as Living Lab, which provides a framework for making issues of social and environmental sustainability tangible through collaboration and the arts.
Judy Chicago (born 1939) is a feminist artist, educator and author whose career spans almost half a century. She is known as one of the founders of the Feminist Art Movement, creating in the early 1970s the pioneering Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College (now California State University), which became a vehicle for intellectual stimulation and social change, influencing generations of women.
The art of Regina Frank incorporates textiles, computers, the Internet, solar and LED technology to investigate fields of tension, such as those between the rich and poor, virtual and real, analog and digital, masculine and feminine.
Michelle Stuart seeks to educate with her art. She is in search of a visual language to express nature’s more elusive aspects, along with the fragility of existence. Over her 50-year career, Stuart has drawn upon aspects from the natural world — cycles, forms, colors — while studying myriad cultures and histories. View our mini-retrospective in the Spring 2010 edition of On The Issues Magazine.
In keeping with the topic of Passion, Freedom & Women, Miriam Schapiro is a groundbreaking artist who, in her 60-year career, stepped out of the mold to fight for women’s artistic freedom and the democratization of art in the Winter 2010 edition of On The Issues Magazine.
Faith Ringgold’s illustrated story, How the People Became Color Blind, with Ringgold herself reading the text that accompanies the drawings in the Fall 2009 edition of On The Issues Magazine.
Tammy Rae Carland: An artist tests identity by performing her father and mother in the Summer 2009 edition of On The Issues Magazine.
Judith K. Brodsky addresses discrimination against women in male arenas in the Spring 2009 edition of On The Issues Magazine.
New York artist Joyce Kozloff, an originating figure of the Pattern and Decorative movement, in the Winter 2009 edition of On The Issues Magazine.
Martha Rosler, known for placing unsettling images in familiar places, in the Fall 2008 edition of On The Issues Magazine.
Suzanne Lacy’s 1974 Project on Prostitution in the Summer 2008 edition of On The Issues Magazine.
Linda Stein’s sculpture envisions empowerment for women with HIV-AIDS in the May 2008 edition of On The Issues Magazine.