During her often tumultuous, challenging, and sometimes controversial career, Judy Chicago pioneered Feminist art and art education. She joins to talk about her memoir “Revelations,” a radical retelling of human history in the form of an illuminated manuscript.
Debbie Millman:
In the forward to Judy Chicago’s 2021 autobiography, The Flowering, Gloria Steinem wrote, “Judy Chicago has spent her life not only inventing feminist art, but inventing a feminist way of creating art.” And in the upcoming book, Judy Chicago Revelations, Hans Ulrich Obrist states, “Throughout her seven decade career, Judy Chicago has worked tirelessly to contest the absence and erasure of women from the Western historical canon, developing a distinctive visual vocabulary that situates women’s personal and collective experiences. Her work grapples with themes of birth and creation, the social construct of masculinity, her Jewish identity, notions of power and powerlessness, extinction, and a longstanding concern for climate justice. Judy Chicago’s work expresses the transformative power of art using it as a tool to, in her words, educate, comfort, and inspire.” [inaudible 00:01:11].
A four-story survey of her art titled Herstory just closed at the New Museum in New York City and Judy’s first multimedia, immersive, and participatory institutional exhibition titled Revelations opens in May in London’s Serpentine North Gallery. Judy Chicago, welcome to Design Matters.
Judy Chicago:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
Judy, I understand you make a killer cup of coffee, and I was wondering what is your secret?
Judy Chicago:
My secret’s going to my grave with me. In fact, Donald, my husband says, “What do I do?” And I’m like, “Suffer.” No. We live in a small town south of Albuquerque, New Mexico that has 18 fast food restaurants, so I guess you could call it a near food desert. So living there presents challenges like how to get to Whole Foods, and we fly in Pete’s Coffee from San Francisco and I make a special blend.
Debbie Millman:
You were born in Chicago and grew up in, what you’ve referred to, as an unusual politically radical family, in an environment where you were encouraged to stand up for yourself and speak up. That was really unusual at that time. Your parents were very progressive?
Judy Chicago:
Yeah. My parents believed in equal rights for women. That was the good news. The bad news is they didn’t tell me other people didn’t.
Debbie Millman:
Right. You didn’t start talking until you were about two and a half, which initially concerned your parents, but you started drawing before you even started speaking. And one of your preschool teachers told your mother that you were gifted, so your mom borrowed a friend’s Art Institute of Chicago membership card and took you to classes for parents and young children. And you’ve written how you took the number 53 bus to the Art Institute and drew the faces of the people on the bus in the air as if trying to trace out the people you saw around you. At that point, I believe you were 100% sure you wanted to be a professional artist at five years old. Is that correct?
Judy Chicago:
Yes. I never wanted to be anything but an artist.
Debbie Millman:
Now I know your mom saved the drawings that you did back then all her life. Looking back at the art you made back then, what do you see in yourself?
Judy Chicago:
Well, I mean, I could see in the finger painting I did, I was 4, it was called Fun in the Sun, and that was the drawing that motivated my teacher to tell my mother that I was talented. I can see that it was very unusual for a 4-year-old to be able to actually make a landscape image, but it was a landscape image.
Debbie Millman:
I was really intrigued by the way you draw grass in that picture because I remember really struggling with grass when I was in kindergarten, I also loved to draw, and couldn’t get it right. My mother was trying to teach me how to draw it more accurately. I guess I would just do these big green blobs. Where do you think that or early talent came from?
Judy Chicago:
Where does talent in human beings come from? We know everybody has the potential for talent. What produces it in one kid and not in another is probably a question of a combination of heredity and environment. I was encouraged from the time I was very little to express myself and not only visually, but also verbally. My father expected me to participate in the political discussions in the house from when I was very little, and so I learned how to articulate my ideas. My father also trained me in logic. I mean, I was really little, and in values. He worked nights so he would be around when I woke up from my afternoon nap. My mother was at work. I have very vivid memories of sitting on his lap when I was a little girl. He would play these games with me that were aimed at teaching, for example, anti-racist attitudes.
And in the political discussions there were people of all persuasions in our household, and so I grew up in a multiracial environment. And I had a nanny. I guess she wasn’t really a nanny, we couldn’t afford a nanny, she was somebody who took care of me when my mother went to work. And her name was Audey Blue and she was Black. And my father used to play this game with me. We would be walking down the street with Audey Blue and we’d meet Norman Orange and then we’d meet Sylvia White and then we’d meet Howard Green. And obviously, what that game was intended to do was to convey to me that people’s value and their color had no relation. That combined with the fact that he used to say to me, “Everybody sitting on the toilet with their pants down looks the same.” And that actually shaped my lack of understanding of power. That you’re supposed to be deferential to certain people because they’re so-called powerful. But I never forgot my daddy’s lesson about people on the toilet.
Debbie Millman:
Your dad died very unexpectedly when you were 13 years old and you’ve written extensively about how the love that he gave you, that unconditional love and support, really created a foundation for how you’ve been able to love over the course of your life. How did he instill that in you?
Judy Chicago:
The games he played taught me to think logically, taught me to express my ideas, made me feel, and this I think is the most important thing, made me feel that I would be loved by being who I was. And in fact, when I was 40, early 40s, after the collapse of the Dinner Party tour and me and my work were a pariah, I visited my father’s grave, which I had never done because my mother wouldn’t let us go to the funeral or go to the grave or anything. I remember weeping and telling him he had taught me something that wasn’t true, that I would be loved if I were myself because I was myself in the Dinner Party and I was hated.
Debbie Millman:
I know. I want to talk about that in a moment. Your dedication to your artwork continued all through school. You spent countless hours by yourself drawing. You became the official school artist, almost as soon as you entered grammar school. You illustrated yearbooks, you decorated the gym for dances. You then applied to an academic degree program.
Judy Chicago:
I got into the University of Chicago, but the University of Chicago worked in tandem with the Chicago Art Institute, because the Chicago Art Institute didn’t have any academic classes. So if you wanted to go to college at the Art Institute where I had been studying since I was five years old, you had to go to University of Chicago. I was accepted into that program, but I didn’t get a scholarship from the Art Institute, which really aggravated me.
And so quite by chance, when I was 16, the daughter of a friend of my mother’s came to visit from Los Angeles and I went back to Los Angeles with her. And that was a revelation to me because Chicago is like these heavy brick buildings and there was Los Angeles. When I got off the train, I thought the buildings were going to fly away because they were low to the ground and light in color, and I applied to UCLA, which had a good reputation in terms of its art school, in part because my aunt, my mother’s sister lived there. Although that didn’t work out very well. I lived with her and her fascist husband for six months, so that didn’t work out very well at all.
But I had gotten a $500 scholarship from my high school to apply to any college I wanted to go to, and I used that for the tuition at UCLA. I was just really insulted by the Art Institute because I was one of their stellar students. In fact, when the Dinner Party showed in Chicago in 1981, I think, I toured my Art Institute teacher. I had one teacher. The classes I went to with my mother’s friend’s membership card, they were in a big auditorium, and I did that for three years. But when I was 8, I don’t know how my mother pulled it off because we had no money. By then, my father had lost his job as a result of McCarthyism, so my mother was basically supporting the family and it was just a terrible period.
Somehow she found the money to send me to the junior school, and there was one teacher there, Manny Jacobson. I took classes from him from the time I was 8 to the time I was 17 and went to California. He spoke very softly like this. And when the Dinner Party went to Chicago in an alternative space, I gave him a personal tour around the Dinner Party. We walked arm in arm around the piece, and I can still remember him saying to me, “I always knew you were going to do something important.” It was an amazing moment in my life, especially given the assault I was under. So I was just really upset that they didn’t give me a scholarship.
Debbie Millman:
When you were at UCLA, you created a series titled Bigamy, that was abstract, but people were able to recognize the male and female genitalia. And your professors, who were mainly men, were dismayed over this body of work. Why?
Judy Chicago:
They were disgusted. I know particularly for younger women artists, it’s incomprehensible for them to understand. Well, one of the things in general that is a problem for women and other marginalized peoples is that our histories are erased, and so we grow up without understanding our histories. So young women artists don’t know very much about most of them, about the history of women’s art or even that there were women artists. Because when I was in college, there were two attitudes. One, there had never been any great women artists. Two, women had never made any contributions to history. And the biggest compliment a young woman artist could get is, “You paint like a man.” There was no permission to be oneself as a woman, as an artist of color, as a gender-nonconforming person, no permission at all.
So for example, I remember in the 1970s, there was an article in Art Form about Marsden Hartley, the great painter, and there was a picture of a man with a flower behind his ear, and the writer did the first reading of homosexuality in art that had ever been done. I mean, I wanted to be taken seriously as an artist in the LA art scene, and what I learned from the response to my early work was if I was going to be taken seriously, I would have to excise any reference to gender in my work. Which I tried. I tried to be a guy for 10 years, it just didn’t work.
Debbie Millman:
I read that that rejection that you were getting from your faculty resulted in you churning to sculpture. You created casts strung with heavy ropes and large clay forms in a less representational style and you also began to-
Judy Chicago:
It wasn’t just for my professors because I started showing while I was still in school. I think even when I was in graduate school, I started showing. I mean, it was also from the male-centered art scene, which was more important to me than my professors. Although I almost didn’t get my masters from UCLA because they were so upset about my forms, my sense of color, it was… Oh, God. Anyway, it’s funny because after I wrote my first book, Through The Flower, my first autobiographical book, I ran into one of my former art professors who talked in a gravelly voice. And he came up to me and he said, “I’m not a male chauvinist.” And I’m like, “Yeah, you are.”
Debbie Millman:
But after your first exhibition in 1965, you felt that your work was, “An insipid version of your original vision and a suppression of your real concerns and forms of expression to fit in with a male dominated aesthetic.” So Judy, my question is how did you begin to break away from that suppression?
Judy Chicago:
I spent almost 10 years in the LA art scene battling for a place and having a really hard time. I was doing large, minimal work. I was doing my early fireworks. I was doing both painting and sculpture, and I actually started doing sculpture in college because of the resistance I was facing in the painting department. There was a young, sculpture teacher named Oliver Andrews, who was very supportive of women art students, and so I segued into sculpture in order to get support.
In fact, he gave me a teaching assistantship when I was getting my master’s, which was in the 1960s, which must have been incredibly unusual at that time. It was not until later in the ’60S, 1968, by which time I’d already been showing for seven years, six years, that I began to wonder if any women before me had encountered the kind of obstacles I was facing. And that’s when I started my self-guided research into women’s history.
Again, my father’s influence was strong because my father was a student of history. That’s, I think, one of the reasons it occurred to me, I might look back in history. I hadn’t made a radical break yet in my art. For the next two years while I continued to make… By then, I was doing my domes, which were about in a way, minimal forms containing my exuberant color, which I had started releasing into the environment with my smoke pieces. So I started discovering all this information about women’s cultural production. I selected a number of women authors and read their entire [inaudible 00:20:09], Virginia Woolf on East [inaudible 00:20:12], Edith Wharton, Jane Austin. I started trying to look for women’s art, which was very hard because even if the work was reproduced, it was in black and white and small. But as I often say, I got really off, but rage can fuel creativity, and in my case it did, and I decided that I was going to try and figure out how to make more authentic art as a woman.
I couldn’t do it in the LA art scene. I mean, the New York art scene is, as you well know, a highly pressurized place. LA wasn’t as evolved then. There wasn’t as much of an art market, nothing, but even so, it was male dominated and I wanted to figure out how to think and make art in a new way. So I had to go away from LA. So I looked around to see if I could find a teaching job. It’s really funny when people call me an educator, which I mean, I know I’m educated, but it’s been through my art because all told I’ve only taught in institutions for six years all together, but I took my first full-time job.
I got a job at what was then called Fresno State University, and I got the head of the art department to support my idea for doing a women’s only class by… And this is actually true, it just wasn’t my whole agenda. Going through college and going through art school and going through graduate school, there were a lot of women, but as I moved into professional life, there began to be less and less and less women. So I said, I want to try and help young women become professional artists. Well, that was true. And he was a nice guy and he supported the idea. I didn’t tell him what my real intention was, which was to figure out how to create a feminist art practice and to reconnect to those impulses in my early work that I had excised.
By then, I mean, I had now spent 10 years learning to work in a new visual language that obscured my gender. I didn’t even know how to exactly reconnect. So I figured if I went back to when I began to do that and helped younger women build an art making that did not require them to deny their gender, I’d figure it out for myself. And that was what my time in Fresno was. Even though people give me all this credit for starting the first feminist art program and blah, blah, blah, it was my desires and needs as an artist that propelled me to do that. It’s just that I’m a naturally generous person and I’m a kind of natural teacher to a point. I mean, I’m very good at being able to help students find their voices. I’m very good at that.
Debbie Millman:
How do you do that?
Judy Chicago:
Well, I do it by adopting a technique I saw my father use, which was… People always say I use consciousness raising, but actually… I mean, consciousness raising grew out of Marxism, and my father was a Marxist. I remember the phrase, I’m sure you know it, “Speak truth, define truth,” or something like that. So there were basically group sessions in early days of communism in Russia, and I think that must have been where my father adapted his method because in his political discussions that’s what he did, he went around the circle and everybody spoke. Now I started doing that when I was in college and taught a high school art class to make money. I did it with my students. And what I found out was the loudest voice is not always the smartest voice. It was almost always a guy’s voice. But anyhow, so I used that technique in Fresno.
By then I’d gotten pretty good at it. It’s the opposite of how my college professors conducted themselves, where they stood up in front and imparted all their knowledge to what were presumably empty vessels. Well, that’s not how I teach because actually students aren’t empty vessels. I think I redefined the role of the teacher to be more of a facilitator and facilitating my students in the needs and interests they articulated when we went around the circle and with young women, that was very easy actually, because at least at that point, they were so discouraged from expressing themselves that once they were encouraged to express themselves so much… It was like I described [inaudible 00:26:49] through the flower, it was like taking the lid off a boiling pot. There was like an explosion. It’s like when those girls dressed up as CUT leaders and made costumes and went to the airport, did CUT chairs in 1971.
Debbie Millman:
I know you don’t want to talk too much about the Dinner Party. I don’t want to talk about the making of the Dinner Party or the craft of the Dinner Party as much as I want to talk about the early critical dismissal, which was vitriolic, that’s an understatement. Over the years, those views by the New York Times, by The Guardian, by Time Magazine has fundamentally shifted. Robert Hughes review in Time Magazine, it was so bad you cried. At the same time these reviews were being printed. Your shows had record numbers of attendees. What did you make of the schism between the critic’s reception and the public reception?
Judy Chicago:
It was very confusing. It’s important to understand that when the Dinner Party… Well, first of all, let’s not skip the period between the time I went to Fresno to figure out how to create a feminist art practice and what I did in the years leading up to starting the Dinner Party in 1974 where I continued my research, I worked on my imagery, I gradually figured out how to bring the abstract form language I had developed in the first decade of my career into greater clarity of form. I studied China painting. I apprenticed myself for two years to a China painter named Mim Silinsky because I was both working on my imagery and trying to make it more specific, and some of the images I did then were called The Great Ladies, where I was trying to make abstract portraits of the women I was discovering, and I was spraying because I had gone to autobody school to learn to spray paint.
I was spraying the images and a lot of people like my Great Ladies paintings, they’re like, “Why don’t you just do more of those?” It was a constant thing from dealers, but not then, only recently. Then I couldn’t even get a gallery to show them. But spraying has a kind of generalizing of form unless you use the Paasche airbrush, which I didn’t like. It’s too small for me. But anyway, it was the wrong technique for the specificity of images I wanted to create in the Dinner Party, which is why I learned to China paint. I wanted to use a brush again, but I never liked oil paint, and when I saw China painting, I’m like, oh my God. Even though it was embedded in a hobbyist tradition that no one took seriously, but like my daddy said, everybody looks the same. In other words, the hierarchies that existed in the art world and still do of art versus craft and what techniques are appropriate for art. I mean, I just don’t filter through those kind of hierarchies of power or status.
It’s just outside of my consciousness. So by 1974, when I was ready to start the Dinner Party, which I started of course, all by myself because with the hubris of youth I, single-handedly with my paint brush was going to overcome the erasure of women’s history. Well, as everybody knows, first one person came to work with me and then another person, and slowly my solitary existence as an artist gave way to a big studio. And even then people say all full of artists. No, it was more like a contemporary male artist like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst studio. So with a lot of assistance and some paid, some unpaid, but we all worked out of a commitment to that goal of trying to teach women’s history through art. Inside the studio there was an egalitarian environment. It wasn’t just the Dinner Party that was attacked. It was that people could not imagine an egalitarian environment. I remember in the Dinner Party studio, some of the workers, the participants would say, “Ah, now it’s time to go back to my real life.”
And I never understood it because that was my real life. In my life, in my vision, in my way of being and doing, it was all based on egalitarian principles. And so when the Dinner Party emerged after five years of work, it was in San Francisco and it was a huge success. I mean, unbelievable success. There were lines around the block for the Dinner Party. And I was being celebrated. People would bring me flowers and gifts. I mean, it was like my first thing was, oh my God, all my anxieties about whether a woman artist can be herself and work at the same level of ambition that men have. I mean, I thought, oh, well, I was wrong. Ha ha. I mean, I can still remember when a woman named Susan Stamberg interviewed me for NPR, and I was going on and on about this, how incredible it was, and she’s like, “But Judy, what will you do when the controversy starts?” And I’m like, “Controversy? What controversy?”
So the first indication of that was when the museums scheduled to show the Dinner Party as part of a tour when they canceled. And at the end of it supposedly successful run, the Dinner Party went into storage, and I went into shock. I lost everything.
Debbie Millman:
You were also severely in debt from paying for so much.
Judy Chicago:
I was in debt. I moved to the Bay Area and into the smallest apartment I’d had since I was 21, and the smallest studio I’d had since I was 21. And I had a book contract about the needle work, thank God. And that summer, I mean, people were calling me all the time. I think they thought I was going to kill myself. That’s when I became a long distance runner. I used to go for these really long runs. It would take me two hours every morning to just get over my depression sufficiently to be able to go back and work.
I was very fortunate because number one, there was a woman named Diane Gellan who had come to work with me when I was first starting the Dinner Party, and at that time, I was so devastated by the reviews that happened after the Dinner Party went to New York, that’s when it happened. That was the next year, because then at that time, critics like the New York Times, Hilton Kramer, they determined your fate as an artist. I had no opportunities. I had no career, basically. All I had was a burning desire to make art. And I had become interested in the subject of birth by doing the runner back for Mary Wilson Craft, picturing her dying from child bed fever two months after she gave birth to her daughter, who became Mary Shelly, who wrote Frankenstein. And that scene stimulated my interest in the subject of birth because I realized there are almost no images of birth in Western art, or at least I thought that then. That turns again not to be true.
What’s actually true is that not only have women’s voices been erased, but any subject matter considered not important by the patriarchal paradigm is also erased. But I didn’t know that at the time. Anyway. I was thinking maybe I should just withdraw the Dinner Party from public view. Diane is like, no way, Jose, I didn’t spend five years of my life in driving a school bus because she wouldn’t accept a salary, even a modest salary because her thing was, “If you don’t hire me, you can’t fire me.” I mean, she’s remarkable.
Anyway. So she started organizing this grassroots tour. I started working on images of birth in my studio, but I wanted to do it completely differently. I didn’t want another head on collision with the art world. I had seen these quilts hanging on a trip to New Mexico when I went here for the first time to work at Tamr and the print shop. And I thought, I know, I’ll do images of birth in needle work because I had seen in the runner back how needlework soften the subject of birth, which can be pretty graphic and raw, and I’ll just have people hang them on clotheslines all over America. There’ll be just like birth images everywhere.
So I brought these patterns to the book launch of the needlework book, which was at the San Francisco Museum, and I had… I don’t know. Oh, I know what happened. This woman from the Chronicle came to interview me because she wanted to write about the book, the Needlework book, and she saw all these images of birth, and she wrote instead about how I was starting a new project in needle work about the subject of birth, and in three weeks I got 300 letters from needle workers saying they wanted to volunteer. So I got all these patterns. I bought $700 worth of fabric, which in 1980 was a lot of money, and I brought them all to this meeting at the San Francisco Museum, which I had set up during the book signing. I had flyers. And by then a woman named Mary Ross Taylor, who lived in Houston and who organized the first grassroots showing of the Dinner Party had become very interested in the impact of the Dinner Party.
This goes back to your question about the difference between the audience reaction and the critical reaction, because she couldn’t get any museum to show the piece, which is why she organized an alternative structure, which became the model for all the other communities that organized around the world, and she came to that meeting in which all I got was people’s names and contact information, and I had given out all this art and all this fabric, and she comes from Arkansas, and I’ll always remember her saying, “I think you all are going to need some organizational help.” And she moved to California to do that.
I mean, people don’t yet understand that my career has been fueled by people who have been so moved by my art that they wanted to support me. Without that, I could never have stood up to the vitriol. But I was also saying about the egalitarian nature of the studio. I mean, that was also when women started accusing me of exploiting the people who worked with me, which I mean, oh my God, so far from the truth. In fact, in the Serpentine Show, there’re going to be interviews with some of the Dinner Party participants in which they’re going to talk about what they got from working in the Dinner Party studio.
Debbie Millman:
Why do you think so many people have been so angry about your work?
Judy Chicago:
I have no idea. You have to ask them.
Debbie Millman:
Judy, after six decades of professional practice, you had your first retrospective at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. The reviews were rapturous.
Judy Chicago:
They weren’t as rapturous as the New Museum.
Debbie Millman:
But they were still pretty good. They said it was a revelation.
Judy Chicago:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
They said it was a revelation to see the range of subject matter and techniques.
Judy Chicago:
Yeah. Revelation, not rapture. Okay.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve since had a major retrospective, as you just said, at the New Museum, which just moved to Luma in France.
Judy Chicago:
Yeah. Luma Foundation show was opening at the end of June.
Debbie Millman:
Do you feel any differently about your work now that it’s being so appreciated and revered?
Judy Chicago:
Nah. You know what? I don’t think people realize the amount of work it takes to mount major exhibitions, okay? What that means, especially now that I’m old and have way more limited energy, is that I do not have a lot of time to do what I still want to do, which is make art. So it’s conflictful. I’m represented by a dealer named Jeffrey Deitch, along with Jessica Silverman in San Francisco. But anyway, Jeffrey’s always on me about, “I know, Judy.” You want desperately to be in your studio, but this is the time you have to focus on your legacy.” So I’m trying my best, but still, they’re funny moments. So for example, I got interviewed before the New Museum show, and the woman who was interviewing me said, “What are you doing to prepare for the show?” I knew what she was thinking. She had this vision of me in my painting clothes frantically turning out art, and I started to laugh and I said, “Is that before or after I answer the 13 emails from the curator Massimiliano Gioni that I woke up to this morning?”
Debbie Millman:
I read that you used to work 17 hours a day. What are you doing now?
Judy Chicago:
I used to work 17 hours a day.
Debbie Millman:
7 days a week.
Judy Chicago:
Yes. Oh, I had an artist friend in LA named Judy Baca, who’s a wonderful muralist and is also finally getting her due. But I remember when I visited her, I think in the ’80s, and she said, “I have to take the weekends off. I just am so tired.” And I’m like, “Well, what do you do?” Because I couldn’t imagine not working all the time. Anyway. Don’t get me wrong. I’m very gratified by the fact that the New Museum show helped viewers understand my body of work and the context out of which it grows. The historic context out of which it grows through the City of Ladies, which is based on the book by Christine de Pizan called The Book of the City of Ladies, which chronicles the contributions of 500 women, historic women, many of whom we had to re-research for the Dinner Party.
The City of Ladies contained works and writings by 90 women dating back to Hildegard von Bingham. This is the cultural context I started to discover when I did research starting at the end of the ’60s. This is what I have had carried in my head and in my heart for decades, and it’s the historic context out of which I worked. Some of the rapturous reviews grew out of the fact that for first time people actually were able to understand my work because I’ve been a complete outlier in the world. I just did not fit in because I don’t fit in a patriarchal paradigm. I fit in to a different alternative, female centered paradigm about which too little is still known.
Okay. So that’s one piece of what’s happening. The other piece of what’s happening is the Serpentine Show and the publication of Revelations, which outlines my underlying vision of equality and justice for everyone on the planet, human and non-human, which provides the philosophical underpinnings of all my work. That book, combined with the Serpentine Show, will make people, I hope, at least expose people to my vision and together the fact that this year, both my historic context and my philosophical vision will become available for people to understand, plus I’m having with the Luma Show, my first retrospective in Europe.
Debbie Millman:
Your upcoming show at The Serpentine takes its name, the Revelations from an illuminated manuscript that you wrote in the early 1970s as the mythological underpinning to the Dinner Party, and each page of the manuscript has been meticulously designed and constructed for the show. What do you hope people will come away from the show better understanding about the world?
Judy Chicago:
I hope people will come away with an understanding of what my father taught me when I was a little girl, that the world can be changed and that we all have an obligation to make a contribution to that.
Debbie Millman:
Judy Chicago, thank you for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Judy Chicago:
Thank you, Debbie. Nice to be with you.
Debbie Millman:
Judy Chicago show, Herstory, will be opening at Luma in France in June, and Revelations will be opening at the Serpentine North Gallery on May 22nd. To read more about Judy Chicago and see a comprehensive overview of her work, you can go to judychicago.com. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.