The Textile Museum of Canada presents Judy Chicago - - - In Thread

Written by Sharon MacDonald Friday, 11 November 2011 22:19

Toronto, Canada - Living legend of feminist art, Judy Chicago’s place on the landscape of contemporary textile practice is a significant one. Best known for her groundbreaking sculptural installation, The Dinner Party (1974-1979), Chicago has spent decades exploring the possibilities of “thread as brushstroke.” This exhibition surveys some of Chicago’s most important contributions in cloth, highlighting both key and lesser-known works dating from 1971 to present. From macramé to needle point to airbrushed quilts, Chicago employs “technique as content” in her major projects selected for this survey exhibition including the Birth Project (1980-1985), the Holocaust Project (1993) and Resolutions: A Stitch in Time (1994 to present). This exhibition centralizes the labour-intensive nature of Chicago’s textile work as a metaphor for investing in the ideas, values, histories and provocations in her artwork. On view through 7 September, 2009.

Textile arts and crafts attract popular attention among women because so many women identify with the materials, the techniques, and the social and cultural significance of objects that are typically made, used and located in the domestic realm. Judy Chicago became aware of her potential, as a female artist, to legitimize women's artistry when she made the critical decision to create many of her works in textile media. Because she relied on the skills and labour of other women, her studio practice necessarily shifted into a social enterprise that activated her celebration of women's work even further. This in itself was a feminist action because it was energized by and contributed to a general awareness of women's political and personal circumstances. Chicago's process reinforced her belief in the power of art to change the individuals who make it, and made her faith in the capacity of art to affect an audience.

In 1979, Judy Chicago first exhibited her major installation, The Dinner Party (1974-1979) , at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Motivated by her observations of the art world's general lack of knowledge of women's artistic, social and cultural heritage, and perplexed by a lack of female role models for her as a developing artist - mixed with strong personal ambitions to contribute to a contemporary artistic landscape as a woman - Chicago set out to correct this gap and communicate the significance of women's achievements around the world and throughout centuries. The Dinner Party, made predominantly of hand-painted porcelain plates and embroidered table runners, was Chicago's now-famous foray into a historically female-dominated world of china painting and needle arts as the basis of her own designs and concepts that radically altered ideas of the communicative capacity of textile materials and techniques.

Judy Chicago's 19 framed textiles and sculpture that comprise Resolutions for the Millennium: A Stitch in Time (1994 - 2000) represent a technical culmination of her own painterly hand, or stylistic signature, in partnership with a team of artisans who worked their embroidery, beading, macramé, quilting and other needlework skills in tandem with her sprayed acrylics and oil paint strokes. The images are reinterpretations of traditional adages and proverbs, focusing on such age-old values as family, responsibility, tolerance, human rights, ecology, hope and change in a lighthearted vision of old-fashioned ideas. By the time work had begun on the Resolutions series, 10 years had passed since the completion of the Birth Project, and many of the textile artists who had worked on it also worked on Resolutions. Judy Chicago describes the combination of painting and needlework in Resolutions as a successful synthesis of individual makers' marks:

Five artists who take this notion to heart are profiled alongside Chicago, underscoring her ongoing and unmistakable influence and creating an intergenerational dialogue with Chicago’s most recent work “What If Women Ruled the World” (2008): Orly Cogan, (New York, NY); Wednesday Lupypciw (Calgary, Alberta); Cat Mazza (Troy, NY); Gillian Strong (Halifax, Nova Scotia); and Ginger Brooks Takahashi (New York, NY).

The Textile Museum of Canada is one of Toronto's most engaging visual arts organizations.  With more than 12,000 objects from more than 200 countries and regions, the TMC's permanent collection celebrates cultural diversity and includes traditional fabrics, garments, carpets and related artifacts such as beadwork and basketry.  The Museum offers a broad variety of exhibitions including themed shows based on our permanent collection and contemporary exhibitions of the work of Canadian and international artists. Visit : www.textilemuseum.ca