Judy Chicago: Herstory 2023

“Judy Chicago: Herstory” will span Judy Chicago’s sixty-year career to encompass the full breadth of the artist’s contributions across painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, textiles, photography, stained glass, needlework, and printmaking. Expanding the boundaries of a traditional museum survey, the exhibition will place six decades of Chicago’s work in dialogue with work by other women across centuries in a unique Fourth Floor installation. Entitled “The City of Ladies,” this exhibition-within-the-exhibition will feature artworks and archival materials from over eighty artists, writers, and thinkers, including Simone de Beauvoir, Hildegard of Bingen, Artemisia Gentileschi, Zora Neale Hurston, Frida Kahlo, Hilma af Klint, and Virginia Woolf, among many others.

Taking over four floors of the Museum, “Herstory” will trace the entirety of Chicago’s practice from her 1960s experiments in Minimalism and her revolutionary feminist art of the 1970s to her narrative series of the 1980s and 1990s in which she expanded her focus to confront environmental disaster, birth and creation, masculinity, and mortality. Contextualizing her feminist methodology within the many art movements in which she has participated—and from whose histories she has frequently been erased—“Herstory” will showcase Chicago’s tremendous impact on American art and highlight her critical role as a cultural historian claiming space for women artists previously omitted from the canon.

“Judy Chicago: Herstory” is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Senior Curator, Margot Norton, Chief Curator, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (former Allen and Lola Goldring Senior Curator at the New Museum), and Madeline Weisburg, Assistant Curator.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog co-published by Phaidon and the New Museum, featuring a conversation between the artist and Massimiliano Gioni, and contributions by Glenn Adamson, Connie Butler, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Ann Goldstein, Jennifer Higgie, Candice Hopkins, Amelia Jones, Quinn Latimer, Margot Norton, Kymberly Pinder, Ian Wallace, Madeline Weisburg, and Carmen Winant.