Judy Chicago

This Cultural Life

John Wilson's guest is the pioneering American artist, author and educator Judy Chicago. Having run the first ever feminist art course in California, she established herself as a powerful advocate of women artists in the early 1970s. She is best known for a ground-breaking installation piece called The Dinner Party, a monumental work which was made with the help of a team of ceramists and needle-workers over five years and first displayed in 1979. Now enjoying her sixth decade as an artist, Judy Chicago is regarded as a trailblazing figure in the art world.

Judy recalls studying at the Art Institute of Chicago's children's classes at the age of five, and afterwards wandering around the galleries upstairs where she was particularly drawn to the Impressionists. It was here that she first decided to become an artist. As a young woman she moved to the west coast to pursue her dream. Although she found the art scene there "inhospitable" to women, she was inspired by a group of male artists including Ed Rucha, Larry Bell and Bill Al Bengton, associated with the LA-based Ferus gallery.

Judy also cites discovering Christine de Pisan, the Italian-born French medieval poet at the court of King Charles VI of France, as a turning point in her own research and art practice. Like Judy herself, de Pisan had faced obstacles because of her gender and sought to challenge contemporary attitudes towards women by creating an allegorical City of Ladies. She is one of the women represented in Judy Chicago's landmark work The Dinner Party.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Archive used: Omnibus: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, BBC1, 13 January 1981 Rebel Women: The Great Art Fight Back, BBC4, 10 July 2020