For over six decades, Judy Chicago, has worked tirelessly to translate her fight for female empowerment into institutional change. The 84-year-old artist took the social construction and implications of gender as the starting point for a practice that evolved into a universe of systemic interrogations—from the experience of birth, to the abyss of the Holocaust, to the urgency of environmental collapse. That career, along with its interdisciplinary and crosscultural prescience, was honored last night as the worlds of art and fashion united to celebrate Judy Chicago's largest survey to date, "Herstory."
The night began at the New Museum, where four floors are dedicated to the simultaneously sweeping and meticulous exhibition, curated by the museum's Edlis Neeson artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni; Kraus Family senior curator, Gary Carrion-Murayari; assistant curator, Madeline Weisburg; and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive's chief curator, Margot Norton. Guests, including Dianna Agron, Mickalene Thomas, Derek Blasberg, Kate Young, Roze Traore, Jeffrey Deitch, Mariane Ibrahim, Jeffrey Gibson, Peter Marino, Anne Pasternak, and Frédéric Tcheng, filled the galleries, taking in Chicago's forays into mediums as distinct as stained glass, needlework, and drawing.
As the night wore on, attendees made their way up the Bowery for a sumptuous dinner hosted by Dior, with whom the artist has a longstanding collaboration, at The Bowery Hotel. The lush decor was envisioned by Dior Maison, and the tableware echoed motifs that have become synonymous with Chicago's oeuvre. As guests settled into the seated event, Gioni and the New Museum's Toby Devan Lewis director, Lisa Phillips, commemorated the evening with a few remarks.
Gioni pointed to the accomplishments that paved the way for experiments like "Herstory" to exist, including the fact that the New Museum is the only New York museum that has had only female directors since 1977, before thanking Chicago for "an amazing adventure." "You are rewriting history with your own work and through the institutions you contribute to," he concluded.
Chicago then stood up to speak, surrounded by an admiring and lively crowd. "I was raised by a father—at a time when fathers did not really participate in parenting—who taught me that I had an obligation to work for change toward a better world, and to make a contribution," she began, before turning to the struggle that defined her career, the work that is left to see a real "paradigm shift" in institutions, and how her partnership with Dior has redefined the possibility for exchange between the worlds of art and fashion.
The artist concluded her remarks with a mention of "The City of Ladies," the exhibition within "Herstory" that puts in dialogue works from over 80 women artists, from Remedios Varo and Maya Deren to Artemisia Gentileschi and Zora Neale Hurston. Chicago recalled that the curators lending these works thanked Gioni and her "for showing work that isn't often shown, for conserving work that's damaged."
Beholding this veritable salon of female geniuses, was "completely overwhelming," said Chicago. "Seeing Hilma af Klint next to Agnes Pelton next to Georgia O'Keeffe, I gave [the Metropolitan Museum of Art's director and CEO] Max Hollein a little hell. I said, 'Why don't we see this all the time?' Anyways, that's the end of my remarks: Why don't we see that all the time?"
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