 Good afternoon, everybody, on this gorgeous weekend, aren't we happy and thrilled? And it is a weekend of International Women's Day, which is why we have our Mamoza up front. And I have to tell you that I didn't find out about International Women's Day until I was in Italy. And all the men and children were walking around all of a sudden one day with little sprigs of Mamoza. And that's when I discovered it was about a decade ago. So I'm glad it's here and I encourage all of you to take a little sprig if you can do so without knocking the vase over and bring it home. And if you don't have somebody to give it to, to love and acknowledge and respect, by all means keep it yourself and enjoy it. I am Elizabeth Sackler and it is really my delight to be here today for a number of reasons. One, that it's International Women's Day and I think of all the incredible women around the world. And then I think who would I want to be and I think the most fun would be to be Whoopie Goldberg. So that's my, I can channel Dr. Ruth maybe next time I'll try Whoopie. This is a very auspicious month. It is Women's History Month. It is the 7th anniversary month. We opened in March 23 of 2007 of the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Thank you. So, and it is Judy Chicago's 75th birthday here. It is also the year of the publication of Judy's 14th book, Institutional Time, a Critique of Studio Art Education published by Manaceli Press. And of course we will be focusing on that today. I think the stars are aligned for a beautiful afternoon and I'm very excited about it. And thank you all for coming. I know it's very tempting to be outside and I know also how important today is. So thank you for being here. We each of us have our own delight about being alive at the same time as someone or having witnessed or seen something extraordinary. So I made a quick list of mine. Seeing Billie Jean King Bobby Briggs match. Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin. That's a good one. Watching Martin Luther King delivering I Have a Dream. And seeing a 20-year-old Mick Jagger delivering and belting out satisfaction. And Aretha Franklin of course. Respect. I saw Michael Jordan many times at the garden flying through the air. And Berezhnikov which is also something that one doesn't forget. Being alive with Judy Chicago is very high on that list for me. Judy is the mother of feminist art. She is an intellectual genius, a brilliant artist, a superb historian, a serious educator, an astute psychologist, a feisty spirit, a beautiful woman and one of my, if not, my dearest friends. And without Judy there would be no Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. And without the dinner party and ultimately without Judy's commitment to halt the erasure of women and fight for the artistic voices of women, women artists. We would be all the poorer. We would be uninformed. We could be uninspired. We would certainly be undernourished. In short, we would not be who we have become without Judy Chicago. An overview of this coming year gives you a picture of her exuberant energy, power and the enormous and sustained effort her art and her heart has had and continues to have on artists' institutions and indeed on our cultural and social landscape. This year to celebrate her 75th birthday she has 10 solo exhibitions nationwide including what will be right here at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Judy Chicago, or it's called Chicago in LA. Judy Chicago's early work 1963 to 1974. It's opening here in April and it will introduce the East Coast audiences to Judy's early works that have minimalism and abstraction that haven't been seen here before. It's going to be very beautiful and very exciting. Judy Chicago is circa 75 at the National Museum of Women and the Arts in D.C. I think there's some women who are here who just saw that actually. They just introduced themselves. It focuses on the 1970s also. Judy Chicago through the archives just opened at Harvard University Schlesinger's Library. Challenge yourself. Judy Chicago's studio art pedagogy at Penn State University Library represents her radical reformation of art education and local color. Judy Chicago in New Mexico 1984 to 2014 opens at the New Mexico Museum of Art. And here this is the first announcement of this in late April and the date is going to be determined and announced in conjunction with our exhibition here at the Sackler Center Judy's first major outdoor installation on the East Coast which she has titled a butterfly for Brooklyn will be here. It will be fireworks, pyrotechnics and LED ignited to outline a giant butterfly and it will be at Long Meadow in Prospect Park. It is certain to be dazzling. You won't want to miss it and you won't want your friends to miss it. Today however is institutional time and reading it. I was reminded yet again of the beauty and complexity of Judy's thinking and of her mind. Judy makes connections. She identifies struggles and proposes fixes. It is her gift and a gift to us to be able to bear witness to this brilliance and indeed we are the beneficiaries of it. There is not a disingenuous bone in Judy's body. She doesn't mince words. Her standards are high. For somebody so serious she has one of the greatest senses of humor that I know. When you read institutional time and we will have as you know a book signing and a chance for you to purchase it, you are not only given a roadmap to a dynamically complete studio art education but you will receive in it history lessons, philosophical treaties, logic and set theory and if that doesn't turn you on, there is how to perform cock and cunt as a pedagogical tool. Judy Chicago for all her wild and woolly ways is the most optimistic person I know. From Chapter 8 she wrote, The classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom. Please help me welcome my favorite friend and fabulous artist Judy Chicago. Hi, good afternoon. I've been told that for people to come inside on a sunny day like today is an act of great commitment. So I thank you. You know where we live in New Mexico it's sunny all the time. So I can't exactly relate to it but okay. Elizabeth and I have been bonded for a number of decades by our interest in changing institutions and making them places that truly represent the diversity of the human spirit. And that's going to be one of the themes of our conversation today. And in terms of my remarks which are going to be directed to changing studio art education, then we will attempt to look at that in relationship to our larger goals. As you know, Elizabeth has had a huge impact on the Brooklyn Museum and the New York art world through the establishment of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. And as many of you know, one of my goals and Elizabeth alluded to in creating the dinner party was to overcome the erasure that has repeatedly eclipsed women's achievements. When I was doing the dinner party with the hubris of youth, Donald could I have the first image? With the hubris of youth, I thought that I could single-handedly with my paintbrush overcome the erasure that I had discovered in my study of history. Unfortunately, one of the things that maturity has brought me is an understanding that we are still in that struggle to overcome erasure. And a recent example of it is the story told by the writer, Sue Munk Kidd. Many of you know this because it was in the New York Times. It's amazing when you live in New Mexico and 20 people send you the New York Times. Because it was in the New York Times! Anyway, she talked about both on television, in interviews, and also in the author's note at the end of the Invention of Wings, that she discovered the story of the Grimke sisters not in her native South Carolina where she was from and so were they, but by seeing the dinner party. In her author's note she said, to the Invention of Wings, she said, how could I have not heard of them? My ignorance felt like both a personal failing and a confirmation of Chicago's view that women's achievements had been repeatedly erased throughout history. And it's the issue of erasure actually that brought me back to teaching in 1999 after a 25-year absence. By then I had been receiving letters from female students at universities and art institutions all over the world who were reporting that they still were learning almost nothing about women's history or women's art. In fact, many of their art professors, both male and female, were actually hostile to female-centered work which they were making. That's one of the differences between when I was young and now is that now it's possible for women and artists of color to work freely, openly out of their own subject matter, but that doesn't mean that they're supported for that in art school or rewarded for it in the art world. Between 1999 and 2005 I took a series of semester-long appointments at a variety of universities around the country. First by myself and then in tandem with my husband, photographer Donald Woodman, who was here helping me with the images and also filming this, documenting this. Actually, one of the reasons we started teaching together is that it solved a problem for us because at that time we had six cats and the first year I had the cats and the second year he kept the cats. The third year we had enough so we decided all of us would have to go wherever and so we started team teaching. I taught alone at IU Bloomington, Duke, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then we team taught at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green where Donald took up a small batch Kentucky bourbon. He said the only way it's possible to live in Kentucky is to drink bourbon. Then in a public-private partnership with Cal Poly Pomona in California and finally at Vanderbilt. So I and we taught at various level schools, mainstream institutions, high-level art schools, rural schools, funky schools. In addition to hoping that I might be able to offer something valuable to students, that is my decades-long experience as a practicing artist and the pedagogical methods that I had begun developing in the 1970s, I wondered whether my pedagogy would still prove empowering and not only maybe for women. I was also interested in discovering what had happened to university studio art education during my long absence and to record what I learned in institutional time, a book that took me actually ten years to write and was very challenging. Donald, honey, can I have the next images? In the first chapter, I review my early feminist art programs in Fresno and then at Kell Arts. We're working with our students, the artist Miriam Shapiro and I created Woman House which continues to have historical impact. As these programs have been widely discussed and written about, I don't really want to spend a lot of time on them except to say that when I brought my Fresno program to Kell Arts, I really did not understand how markedly different my program was from the emphasis of the rest of the art department. In fact, this period at Kell Arts marked the beginning of a significant change in university studio art education as can be surmised from a quote from Paul Brock's 2007 obituary in the LA Times. Paul, who was Mimi's husband, was the dean of the art school and he actually was the one who brought the feminist art program into the school where we were provided with our own studio space, a materials budget in the first position for a feminist art historian. Probably the first time a mainstream art school ever attempted to address directly the needs of its female students. But even though Paul supported the program, apparently his own views according to the obituary were that quote, art school is less about teaching how to make art than about learning what it means to be an artist, end quote. You could have fooled me. My idea of studio art education was to help students find their own voice by discovering their personal content, then expressing that through appropriate media, which was the emphasis of the feminist art program and my emphasis as an educator when I went back to teaching. The important distinction here is that I stress the importance of content along with developing the skills to express that clearly and effectively. But I left academia soon thereafter in order to concentrate on studio work, so I really didn't understand the significance of the shift Paul introduced until I returned to teaching. One of my first encounters with the consequences of this change was reading Howard Singerman's book, Art Subjects, which included a quote with which I introduce institutional time. This is Howard Singerman. Although I hold a Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture, probably from either UCLA or Cal Arts. It's clear from the book that he went to one of the Southern California schools, but he didn't want to say which one I think, because he didn't want to openly critique them. Although I hold a Master in MFA in sculpture, I do not have the traditional skills of the sculptor. I cannot carve or cast or weld or model in clay. Why not? This is from the feminist art program. These were the CUNT leaders mortifying their teacher. We went to the airport and they did CUNT chairs for somebody who was visiting us. These are images from Woman House. That's the CUNT and CUNT play that Elizabeth was talking about. How many of you don't know anything about the feminist art programs? I figured. I'm sorry. As I said, this has been very much written about and discussed, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this. I will now briefly discuss my various teaching stance and then share some of my conclusions about the fact that, as Stephen Henry Madoff points out in a book called Art School, Propositions for the 21st Century, quote, current and new students are paying fortunes for inadequate art educations and getting into bank loan debt, which is a huge disservice to them. In returning to teaching, I mean it's a pretty devastating statement and I found his writing in the book Art School some of the only really honest writing about what's going on in studio art education. There's a remarkably small amount of literature on the subject of university level studio art education. A point I will come back to. In returning to teaching in 1999, I was particularly interested in addressing the gap between art school and art practice. Many students find this transition difficult, but it seems especially challenging for women because many of them have little or no idea how to generate the money, space, or time necessary to set up a life as a professional artist. Consequently, in most of the universities where I taught, I instituted a project class, like this one, that would allow students to experience the different stages of professional art practice from identifying personal subject matter and formulating images to mounting an exhibition. My hope for that was that by traversing the gamut of difficulties between creation and exhibition, participants might become better prepared for the rigors of professional life. At IU Bloomington, I hope that some men would sign up for the class as I was eager to discover if my pedagogy would be useful to them, a subject to which I will return. But that didn't happen until I taught a graduate seminar class at UNC Chapel Hill. The images you see are just a few from the wildly successful exhibition that was the result of the IU project class, held at the I.M. Pay Design University Art Museum. And of course, the title was based on our very own Brooklyn Museum sensation show, which was up at the same time. When I was at IU in the 1990s, post-feminism was all the rage, especially in the art world, which was loudly proclaiming, they do this over and over again, that feminist art was passe, assuming a world where the gains of feminism were unequivocal and its goals roundly met. Now, where has that happened? I must have missed it. However, my students' performances conveyed a very different story, one that expressed their confusion about the fact that they were being encouraged to believe that they could do and be what they wish. However, their life experiences were contradicting this rosy view, which was expressed in the performances they did. Some of the consequences of this fiction were brought home to me at all places at Duke, where I taught next, which is a stellar university, at least for the male students. Early on, I encountered the fact that the female students in my class, and they were in the majority, were so preoccupied with what was happening to them on campus that they seemed unable to concentrate on the subject matter of the class, which was I was invited to do a class, a project class, on three of the subjects that I had worked on, women's history, birth, and the Holocaust, since... Oh, could I have the next image? The studio... The studios at that time at Duke were very small and inadequate, and that's changed since I was there, and most of my students were not art majors because there wasn't much of an art department, but I didn't expect them to all want to make art, but they ended up doing that, which meant we were just in a regular classroom. I used to have to stand up on a desk to do critiques, and like my IU students, they ended up doing an incredibly successful exhibition. Finally, they were very inspired by the subject matter, and the exhibition was so successful that the administration decided to keep it open longer, but that was the end of the semester. Early in the semester, I never would have anticipated that outcome because the women, my female students at the beginning complained about how they were being viewed as objects by the male students. They were being judged by their looks rather than their intellectual abilities, and they were being dismissed when they tried to express their ideas in class. Some of the students mentioned that when they first arrived at the school, their pictures were placed in little black books that were circulated among the male students who competed for the triumph of being the first one to get them, that is to take them to bed. Consequently, they all talked about how they dampened themselves down as one student put it. Having these discussions with my Duke students shocked me and caused me to experience an intense sense of deja vu. It was almost like being back in the early 1970s with the Fresno girls. They all say, Judy, we're all in our 50s or 60s now, and I go, yeah, you'll always be girls to me. Anyway, these stories were all too familiar. Identity, confusion, destroyed hopes, eroded self-esteem. But how could this be? This was Duke in 2001 in the supposedly post-feminist era where there was a strong women's studies department and at that time a feminist president named Nan Keone. What there was not, however, was a transformed curriculum. As I point out in the book, when women were finally brought into higher education, no thought whatsoever seems to have been given to the fact that they were going to be introduced to an entirely male-centered curriculum. The renowned art educator, Elliott Eisner, often spoke about the null curriculum, the idea that what schools do not teach may be as important as what they do. Sitting in classes that focus on men's achievements with a few women thrown in, coupled with the negative ways in which my students were being treated by their male peers, called into question the institutional and societal stance about female equality. It was confusing, and confused students cannot concentrate. They are physically present, but intellectually absent, or they engage in an intense inner struggle, seemingly exercising their minds while wrestling with crucial personal issues. As a result, the personal ends up overpowering all other concerns. This situation places immense pressure on women to accept the patriarchal status quo, even if it means that, as the famed pioneering feminist historian Goethe Lerner pointed out, they have to act against their own best interest. This same situation is present in art. As I often say, there's the big male-dominated art history, and the little women's art, even though for a long time, female artists have been a major presence in the art world. A history that I outline in chapter two, where I also discuss the fact, although I can't go into it right now, that studio art curriculum is inherently biased against women, though not perhaps intentionally in the same way that university education is not intentionally biased against women. It's just what does it mean when you go to a school and you study what men do? What does it mean when you go to an art museum and you look at what men made? What does that do to your self-image? What does that do to your feeling about what you're capable of doing? Okay, could I have the next? Chapter five in the book is called What About Men? At the same time as my class at Duke, I did a graduate seminar at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Half of the students were male, which provided the first real opportunity to discover whether my pedagogical methods could be applied to more than the occasional fellow. There were a few guys in the Duke class. I was also curious to see what impact their presence would have on class dynamics. Over the last 30 years, the perspective of men in a feminist environment has been vigorously debated. The consensus has been that when men are present, they tend to dominate the classroom. Despite the fact that my circle-based pedagogy counters this tendency, that means going around the circle and asking everybody what they think. There was a time that I also was convinced that if men were present, women could not be themselves. When I returned to teaching, I was convinced of this premise. Suffice it to say that a number of my male students benefited from my approach to teaching, especially in at home, the next teaching project at Western Kentucky University, which revisited the subject of the home 30 years after Womanhouse, this time with both male and female students. Again, the issue of erasure became extremely relevant because the women, most of them unschooled in the history of the feminist art movement, reiterated many of the concerns expressed in Womanhouse. In contrast, it was some of the male work that was startling, notably the subjects of male rape and murderous sibling rivalry. And one of the points that I make in the book is that the fact that young women art students are not learning about the feminist art movement or sufficient enough about the history of women's art or women's history generally is an institutional failure. I'm often asked why young women don't want to be identified as feminists or call themselves feminists. And I'm like, well, let's see. If I didn't learn the history of America, how would I ever feel proud of being an American? And when Donald and I did the Holocaust Project together between 1985 and 1993, neither of us knew much about Jewish history because we were raised in secular environments and learning about the history of our heritage made us feel proud of being Jews. So young people who are not raised to know a lot about the feminist art movement how in hell can they feel proud of being feminists? They don't even know what happened. Anyway, could I have the next? In chapter six, I deal with both the at-home project and the next project we did called Envisioning the Future, which we'll look at in a minute, a public-private partnership that was supported by Cal Poly Pomona in the Pomona Arts Colony, which is a collection of galleries, non-profit arts organizations, artists and institutions in and around downtown Pomona, which lies about 40 miles east of LA in an area unfortunately called the inland empire. It's a sort of inland joke in LA. Like what happens is it's kind of like I have this big show that's just opened on Thursday night called The Very Best of Judy Chicago and Manna Contemporary, which is in Jersey City. And the inland empire in relation to LA is kind of like Jersey to New York. Go to Jersey? Anyway, the Pomona project involved almost 80 participants. Instead of working directly with them, Donald and I attempted to train eight facilitators, each of whom led a group composed of eight to ten students and practicing artists, which is an approach I had used dating back to Womanhouse. While most of the facilitators were able to adapt our pedagogy, several of them stumbled at the point at which they had to provide content-based critiques, or crits as they are called, and anybody who went to art school knows that they are an essential part of studio art education. The facilitator's failure was due in large part to the fact that Donald and I had not realized what a problem it would be for them to be able to discuss the content of their students' work. Because the crits that they had experienced in school were probably focused on form and materials, and in some cases they were brutal, which is a subject I also take up in the book. These are some of the images from At Home. Could I have the next? This is the Pomona Art Colony. This is my circle pedagogy. This is me working with the painting group, and that's the painting facilitator standing next to me. There were dozens of exhibitions all over the Inland Empire that grew out of this project. Again, all of these projects I'm telling you about in terms of the art that was made, in terms of the impact on the either institution was very successful. Can I have the next? Here are some of the images. That's from the mural project, which was challenging. I described it in the book, but it did leave a lasting legacy from envisioning the future in the Pomona Arts Colony. Could I have the next? Our last teaching project was at Vanderbilt, which was at that time run by Chancellor Gordon Gee, who has a tendency to get himself in trouble a lot. He was then married to an art educator named Constance Gee, who participated in the class. She was somebody in a way institutional time could have been written for Constance. Constance went to art school. She wanted to be a painter. As she said, for ten years she spent in her studio moving her arm because she didn't want to make a painting, but she had not been helped to find her own vision. Therefore, after ten years she gave up because she didn't know what she wanted to say. She came back actually to art making in the project. One of the things we were interested in trying to do was to integrate studio art history and art education more closely. In the exhibition, university art departments, these are highly compartmentalized. Although our success at this endeavor of integrating them might be described as somewhat dubious, again, as I said, the project and the exhibition were a big success. In chapter seven when I talk about the Vanderbilt project, that chapter is called Beyond the Diploma. We turn to the subject of the often bumpy transition between art school and professional art practice. At this moment in time the sheer number of graduate students is formidable. According to gradschools.com there are 918 graduate programs in art and fine arts in the United States alone. Between 1990 and 1995 there were over 10,000 MFA degrees awarded. A number that is in no danger of diminishing. Most graduates emerge into an art world that provides very few ways for them to earn a living. This forces many to work at full-time jobs which leaves little time or energy for making art. In general, unless an artist comes from a wealthy family there are only two sources other than holding a full-time job. If there are artists in the audience you all know this. One is the gallery system which supports but a fraction of the many artists working in their profession. At any one time there are 40,000 artists walking the streets of New York and another 40,000 walking the streets of London trying to find a gallery. As you all know only a fraction of the artists are supported by the gallery system. And now if you read the New York Times today here in New York not only can you not find a gallery you can't even find a studio for a rent that you can afford. The only other wellspring of support is academia where the competition is fierce because the quantity of candidates greatly exceeds the limited number of jobs. One of the last statistics I read from the FDA is that there are 700 candidates for every job. This situation is made even worse by tenure which ties up positions for decades even when the professors have ceased creating or exhibiting which is not uncommon. Something I certainly encountered as I travel around the country to all of these different institutions. Another thing that I and then we encountered were studio art professors who commandeer studio facilities for their own use. A situation as I said Donald and I encountered or professors who really didn't care about teaching they only did it to earn money while they pursued their artistic careers. Curiously university level teaching is the only area of education where no training is required. Even kindergarten teachers are highly qualified. Moreover studio art education is in great flux with a hodgepodge of approaches including a lot of winging it. One common problem is that there is very little honesty in art schools about what the art world is really like. When I graduated from art school I was able to get by on minimal resources and to work long hours in my studio. At that time there was almost no market art. At least not in Southern California where I was. Today the situation is vastly changed. As artist, curator and educator Yuda Metabower stated also in art school the pressure is on the art schools and programs to connect early with the art market and generate a smooth entry into the system while young artists are under the school still under the schools umbrella end quote. Unfortunately as we all know the art world picks up, extols, rewards and then discards young artists like so many used clothes and unfortunate tendency because careers disintegrate before the artists have the opportunity to mature. I often receive requests for advice from young artists. The best response I can imagine is Fred Wilson's eloquent answer in art schools. I think MFH program should resist the art world. Already legions of young artists come to New York to make it. The idea that this is a beginning of a lifelong journey into the mysteries of making things seems to be a back burner thought if it is thought at all. How unfortunate. How wrong. His words echo my own belief stated in my studio and in my teaching that art is a process of discovery. I believe that it is my duty as a teacher to help my students find their personal vision and the means to express that which means skill training which is consistently being eliminated from art school. What I've learned from my return to academia is that my philosophy stands in direct contradiction to most university studio art programs today which emphasize form over content dazzling media effects over meaning and outsourcing instead of developing skills and produces a lot of boring art if you ask me. Could I have the next? This is a great story about the young woman Fumiko but I tell it in institutional time so I just am going to go through these slides very quickly because I have really got to get to the end. This is what was these were some of the works, these are all young well Joanne was 19. Okay. While we were still at Vanderbilt I received a copy of an upcoming article in a K-12 art education journal that was presumably a tribute to me in the dinner party. Although I understood that the teacher had good intentions her project students creating autobiography plates was antithetical to my goal in that the dinner party is meant to teach women's history and to help girls move beyond the personal in order to expand their horizons and I already told you a story about some of the problems young women have in being able to overcome the personal struggles they face. By that time plans were already underway for permanent housing here but reading the article convinced me that there should be some guidelines for teachers who wish to incorporate the piece into their art classes which has happened many times over the years. Like many university trained artists I had always looked down on art education. Art education? Intense dinner conversations with Constance at the Chancellor's residence introduced me to a new way of thinking about K through 12 art programs which were not my focus and aren't my focus but along the way I learned a lot about them. Constance believed that they should not focus exclusively on making art which most of them do but rather introduce children most of whom will not become professional artists to a wide range of possible ways to be involved in art in their lifetimes and of course this is also true of most undergraduate art students who are not going to become professional artists most of them and when they leave school and stop making art they often leave art they have not been helped to see that there are many ways to be involved in art. With Constance as my guide I ventured into the unknown territory of K through 12 art education and curriculum development much to my surprise in contrast to what I mentioned before the poultry amount of discourse on university studio art education K through 12 educators have long been involved in a comprehensive rethinking of art curriculum something that in my opinion is long overdue in terms of university art education. To my mind there is an urgent need for a radical restructuring of the art and studio art programs that are now being offered which frankly are deficient, dishonest and lacking in standards. In fact young students who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the art school education they're getting might want to think about suing for fraud. We also in terms of studio art education we need to recognize that being an artist even a successful one does not automatically make you a qualified teacher in other words having gotten into the Whitney Biennial does not necessarily mean you should get a teaching job. I've already argued that there needs to be a greater focus on content across the arts. In addition to helping students find their own subject matter critique should include discussions about content as part of a more holistic approach to art. Moreover as I point out in the book the overly harsh and unsupportive critiques that are prevalent today need to be acknowledged for what they are a misguided attempt to separate out serious students from the rest if in fact that is their intent. How many of you see ever saw the movie Art School Confidential? You ought to get it and see it. It's presumably about Yale and it involves a murder and some people did not really understand why there was a murder but actually it's quite clear that what the filmmaker is saying is that art school is murderous. Given the evolving nature of contemporary art any attempt to revise curriculum has to be flexible and adaptable. Certainly it cannot be the product of one person's thinking which is why I am advocating a serious national or international dialogue between studio art and art history professors, art educators and art professionals of all kinds. The 1970s ushered in excuse me a dramatic change in consciousness regarding gender and diversity but that change has not yet been sufficiently translated into significant institutional change which is of course what Elizabeth and I have committed our lives to accomplishing Elizabeth through institution changing me through my work and my art. What I am calling for is a radical transformation in policy and in curriculum one in which women's history, women's art the feminist art movement along with the history and cultural production of other marginalized groups becomes fully and equitably integrated into our museums, universities and art schools which continue to promote a white male centered perspective with a few women and people of color thrown in as what Elizabeth describes as the salt and pepper approach. If such a goal seems overly ambitious I would like to remind my audience that long ago I set out all alone to teach women's history through art. The dinner parties worldwide and ongoing impact demonstrates that change is possible especially if people work together for a common purpose. I wrote institutional time in the hopes that there are many members of the art community who are dissatisfied with the state of university studio art education and who will come together to achieve what Elizabeth quoted Bell Hooks as saying in teaching to transgress which I will restate. The classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom to demand of ourselves and our comrades an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries to transgress. This is education and I would say art as a practice of freedom. Thank you. Discussion we're going to have an opportunity for questions and answers and I think my introduction with Elizabeth I think everything that I said was true and you proven me right. Once again thank you Judy. Thank you Elizabeth. I'm curious to know how many people who are here are in education and how many of those of you keep your hands up who are in education are in art education and how many of you are in other. I'm including art history as part of art okay let's say art education art history and studio art art history studio art art education artists. Alright so we're pretty much half and half of artists and educators so this is very interesting it's going to be very interesting to hear your responses some of your responses to this. Judy could you begin this is the book that we're going to be selling and Judy will be signing when we're finished discussing. Can you tell me or us about your choice for the title of institutional time? I don't know what does it mean? I always called it that in the book I also talk about some of the uneasy relationship between art and academia and the struggle to bring art into academia and neither Donald nor I there's also the problem with artists in academia which Donald and I certainly experience we had health administrators and all that so you could look at it in terms of how slow institutions are to change like glacial pace you could talk about it in terms of what it's like to be in an institution what kind of institution what kind of institution you're doing stuff in jails these days I know people who feel like being in institutions sometimes like being in jail you know and I just had an interesting conversation with a former gallery person who tried running a museum and discovered institutional time was not for him so how many people are in the art market world as in galleries is there anybody here who are gallerists? right no gallerists is going to come so so one of the things that we talked about both of us is changing institutions and one of the things that I find particularly interesting about sort of where we are at this moment in our lives and in our careers is that I think that we each began a little differently but we began from the outside looking in and looking to change your side from without the work that you were doing your early work which you might want to talk about actually the point at which you said no I am not going to be producing art that isn't my voice and then began to explore could you talk about that just for a minute I know everybody probably knows this but let's just take it as a little little slip because I think it's important and now we're within both of us actually I'm going to address that from a different point of view because I just had this experience that I think is cogent so I told you that on Thursday night the show the very best of Judy Chicago Open Atmanic Contemporary sponsored by my New York Gallery 9 house which has never kind of walked a traditional gallery path which is one of the reasons it's kind of well suited to me but people I mean I got such the work the show surveys my career it's got major work from my career and I mean people coming up to me they were like overcome by it I mean I got so much unbelievable feedback you know this is just awesome to see all this work this major work that we knew nothing about and the next day I was saying to Donald I really got upset the next day actually because there were my car hoods which are going to be here and the imagery in my car hoods my painting teachers at UCLA hated hated hated my color sets my early work like my large plastic paintings a lot of this work will be in the show here from the Fresno fans and the flesh gardens nothing I couldn't do anything with them there was complete silence nobody bought them there was no interest in them and in fact my early work came into view as a result of the Getty funded initiative Pacific Standard Time do y'all know what that was the Getty underwrote a huge initiative in California documenting $14 million initiative documenting and celebrating Southern California art from 1945 to 1980 20 of which years I was working in LA and I was very prominent in Pacific Standard Time but one of the curators of the Getty show told me that my male peers complained now about my inclusion because those paintings had too much color they weren't minimal enough they weren't masculine enough I mean even now anyway what the positive responses at the show brought back for me was the vitriol hostility silence and lack of acceptance of every single period of my work from beginning to end and suddenly I thought to myself my God all of a sudden everybody loves it now how did that happen but I think what I'm talking about is having been outside for so long but now everybody loves it and now you are inside and you are writing institutional time and I'm still advocating I'm advocating an alternative path for young artists an alternative path for teaching art an alternative path to what is now a money driven insane system after 50 years of being on the outside you have now had enough experience and you are now in a position to be within institutions to begin to write about the problems within institutions as you perceive them and you have come up with an approach and a need within institutions to address the problems with studio art for art students one of the examples that you give in the book is very interesting it's about content and I bring it up because I think part of what you're talking about is your early work and the color and maybe they didn't like the color but for you as I gather it and correct me if I'm wrong a lot of it had to do with it wasn't content the content absolutely part of what your world is about your art world is about content would you tell everybody about the example that you give in the book about the work of art that was being it was during a crit that was done by a woman and nobody mentioned that content and in fact the instructor was talking about the colors and the application of paint could you tell there were a couple of examples there was the one there was one particularly violent one was that the one with the torsos eviscerated torsos yeah yeah Santa Fe and a friend of ours who taught at what used to be the Santa Fe Art Institute now the Santa Fe University of Art and Design anyway asked me if I would look at the work of one of his students and they had little studio spaces they were undergraduates and so I went and I looked I went into her studio and there were all these eviscerated torsos kind of burned and bruised and I looked at them for a little while and I said to her tell me about whom molested you and she's just like burst into tears and she said that's the first time anybody recognized what I was trying to deal with all my professors said was maybe it would be better if you would hang them on an eye beam and you know how could I recognize what the work was about well I'm schooled history of women's art I've worked with hundreds of women I know the history of the feminist art movement I've looked at the art of a lot of women and I could recognize the subject matter and when I said I made that comment that our school is inherently biased against women is because a lot of the professors male and female don't bring that experience to bear and so they cannot often identify the content of the work and particularly for young women in this case she was dealing with really hot subject matter do you think that there's an adversarial feeling about artwork that portrays or contains such potent content well like for my IU Bloomington class and I include this in the book I had people write applications to get into the class and so you know why do you want to be in this class you know what are you looking for and at the same time there was an issue of the art journal that was presumably about studio art education and there were all these claims being made by all these professors about how they male and female how now is there is you know studio art education is diverse encourage students to be themselves and blah blah blah blah meanwhile I'm reading these applications I'm tired of being called a feminazi because I want to work on female content on my own content I'm tired of being told that feminist artists say because I want to make art about my own identity as a woman I mean one after another after another after another so there was like a total disconnect between what was being claimed and what the students were saying do you think that men want to make art about different things or different subject matter than women some some like the that was what was so interesting at the UNC class which was a graduate crit and a graduate seminar that was 50% men and that was very it was exceedingly interesting to talk about this one man who showed these incoherent videos and through the course of the semester finally he kind of came out with what his content was kind of openly and first of all it was greeted by the other men by total silence complete silence and we started to talk about it and we said you know men aren't supposed to talk about things like this like bed wedding and that's what women do I mean it was really interesting and then in the at home project I mean Donald and I because during the self presentations which precedes the art making which is part of content search this one student having been raped by a woman you know we were like what do you mean raped by a woman I mean we didn't even know it was possible and he ended up I mean we didn't know what to do I mean we didn't know if he was putting us on but we didn't want to I mean then we said well if a woman said this we would accept it we would help him you know he ended up working with three out three women on the rape garage in the new people walked into that space and burst into tears and you know he was somebody who benefited who had all these guys had a lot of content that they had never been encouraged to deal with and how do you intersect skill and artistic rendering with content that's a very good question Elizabeth exceedingly good the way there are many ways to do that one way not to do it is with the example I had when I went to more college the only art college for women in America where the young women for the first two years they never talked about content they only talked about form and materials and then magically in year three they were supposed to now have personal subject matter and they were at sea because nobody had helped them find their own voices or their own content you know as I mentioned skill training is being eliminated from schools now so the way I do it there are a million ways of doing it you can provide fundamentals you know at the beginning that's what I'm talking about in terms of the need for a dialogue about how to develop a curriculum that helps people find their own voices develop the skills to express it and understand what it's really going to be like when they get out of school and try and make their way as artists there seems like there's no want for subject matter it's how to translate the subject matter into an art form and I guess that there's nothing particularly inappropriate about anything it all depends on where your focus is we have two microphones set up on either side of the auditorium so please line up behind them and we'll begin to take some questions we have five or ten minutes to do that I'd love to know especially those of you who either artists I mean I wrote this book for the same reason I wrote through the flower you know I had all these experiences as a young woman artist at a time where nobody spoke about gender issues and I wrote that book and it was translated all over the world and even today I get letters from young women telling me that they're having the same experiences and reading through the flower changed their life because it made them realize there was nothing wrong with them and I wrote this book for the same reason for young artists who are completely baffled by what they're experiencing and thinking somehow that they're failing for young artists who feel dissatisfied with their art school education and don't understand why and think there's something wrong with them for art professors who feel that there has to be a better way than what is happening in the institutions I don't know if it will find its audience or not so I'm very interested in your responses why don't you introduce yourself yes please Judy likes names please we all do so let's begin here on the right please hi I'm Coralina Meyer I recently graduated from an MFA program here in the city and I'm not sure if my question's going to be worded properly but I'm just curious if you could paint a picture of what a good sort of healthy sustainable relationship with economy economics would be in an MFA program I've thought a lot about it and I actually took economics classes while I was in the MFA program just independently and I was just wondering like is there in the context of this very technocratic society that we're evolving further deeply into and being as how tech is one of the few markets where women are more encouraged for higher positions I'm just wondering if you could speak to you know paint up just a more clear picture as to what a healthy relationship to market and business and economics within the MFA program would be are you are you asking how an MFA program could include courses or discussions about the economy of the economics of art and the art market perhaps that but maybe even other ways alternative ways that we creative artists could think about how we can make an income if they're not coming from a wealthy family or something like that how on earth could I solve that I can't solve it for myself I mean it seems like you have a tremendous amount of history and knowledge in terms of and I've struggled and and struggling but I've struggled my entire life I'm not promoting that so you think that we should remain away from the market and just ignore it which is sort of what I've experienced in grad school was that you should not engage in that conversation well actually after you know I was in freeze masters which was last fall which was a very very curated much better art fair than freeze and when Donald and I went through freeze I sort of revise my ideas about what I would do if I were a young artist now because you know I mean I was very fortunate what I came out into is just doesn't exist anymore you know being able to live on nothing being able to get a studio for 75 dollars a month 5000 square feet impossible totally impossible now so I think if I were a young artist now I think I would probably get a full time job and work because you know you have a lot more energy when you're 20 than when you're 70 and you know I would work when I could on weekends and at night and on vacation I'm developing my own vision and I would stay away from the marketplace until I knew who I was as an artist because of how artists are just gobbled up but you know every artist has to find his own path through it I mean what I think is that art schools should just be honest but I mean really if you go to art school you pay $100,000 say to go to some really good art school come out with $100,000 in debt or $75,000 in debt how are you going to feel if your art professor says you know what it's almost impossible to make a living as an artist you really have to face that this is the reality but I think we should be honest the problem is art school your job depends upon having enough students so if you tell the truth you're not going to have enough students and then you won't have a job so I mean this is not a personal problem although we each have to find our personal way this is a much bigger systemic problem in a capitalist society which Elizabeth can address well I could thank you I could but I'm not going to do that here and now I actually have been doing a lot of writing and delivering a lot of discussions and talks, lectures about the art market and about our need to look for an alternative approach and that part of our work now just say it in a nutshell is women are not going to become part of the art market as it exists now it is owned and loved by patriarchal capitalist culture that has it sold by the next so what part of the work now is for women to rethink about how they want their art to be seen where they want it to be seen and how they want it to be sold but that's just sort of a nutshell let's go back to Judy in institutional time with the next question I'm Jasmine Simons from Adelaide South Australia and I'm in New York because there's been a wonderful conference called Making Motherhood Visible and I'm a painter and I'm doing a practice led research I think you have to speak a little more loudly and a little more slowly for us it's hard up here to hear you I'm Jasmine from Adelaide South Australia South Australia Jasmine and I came to New York for a conference called Making Motherhood Visible Making Motherhood Visible Oh I know the mother yes right I'm doing a practice led research and a paint about being a mum and there's still an extraordinary taboo around expressing yourself as a mum your own subjective position as a mum in art and so my question is for both of you as change agents can you offer me some insight as to perhaps what the Sackler Centre might be offering to the topic of motherhood and also art education because academia is really shutting women out who are trying to express who they are as mums I'm going to ask Judy to address that because this is about her and we'll do another something at another time to address it for the Sackler Centre Well you know in the 80s I did a whole project on the subject of birth and motherhood because it was so absent from the art historical record again you know this is part of a much larger set of problems that have to do with the values in our art institutions in our universities and in our museums you are experiencing the outcome of that and you have to decide how much you want to fight you know I fought my whole career you want to fight you're taking on a subject you're going to have to fight about for your call unless enough of us fight it's never going to change it seems that many of the questions revolve around why not and one very simple answer about why not is that we live in a patriarchal world we no longer live in a patriarchal world this is what we are looking at so part of what we have to do is determine how it is that we're going to change it but let's go to the next question Yes Hi I'm Ari Cohen I'm a student at the University of Pennsylvania studying art history and I'm on track to be a grad student in the fall in art history as well so I was actually curious about what you think in terms of the integration now between art history and the fine arts at the university level and things like that oh really oh my goodness are you kidding let me see where it was at some of the oh at some of the universities I mean it was ironic the contents and I were trying to integrate art and art history at Vanderbilt because when we were there the art and art history department were basically having a divorce in fact that it was so dysfunctional the art department that Gordon Gee was contemplating putting it into receivership which is when the university takes over a department and reorganizes it so I mean the relationship like the we had an art historian who was participating in the project with the idea that she would be able to provide the students with you know like research and materials and how to supplement their own art making by looking at work like for example if you were working on motherhood who else had worked on motherhood so she sat in the classes when the students the participants were talking about making their work and she said to us it's like listening to a foreign language that's how little she understood about how to make art what goes on in the studio and I've met art historians whose attitude towards art is that they don't really want to look at real objects they just want to deal with theory so it doesn't sound like a healthy relationship to me I was wondering also actually if you could speak a little bit about how in the past 20 years 25 years ish a lot of art history programs have kind of gone opposite ways so I was wondering what your kind of opinion on that is or like why that has happened what opposite ways it seems like at the university level a lot of departments have sort of split off so like into fine arts and art history they've separated even more and more so I'm wondering where you think universities will go in the next 20 or so years I think that I have no idea I think it's very interesting to me because Judy and I are different generations a little bit but we grew up at a time of protest we grew up at a time where students had voices we grew up with SDS and then when colleges went on strike during the civil rights movement great exhibition downstairs by the way and also of course during the women's movement and the Vietnam War I speak with my even my youngest son and certainly now with my grandchildren and there is an inability for them to conceive of what it was that we were doing without fear the demands we were making the expectations we held the institutions to and the government to and I think part of the voice has to come from the students and it has to come from knowledgeable educators who will absolutely insist of educational institutions that there be change if that's what you want you have a voice as a student and it's absolutely essential that you use it could we have the next question? I think it is interesting I'm sorry I think it is interesting I think that the questions in a way have been asking us to solve what you know what I'm trying to find out is are you experiencing what I'm talking about I mean is this what am I are the remarks that I made or the things that Elizabeth said I mean does that have resonance to you? I think the answer is yes Judy what we're hearing is that everybody's experiencing exactly what it is that you're writing about but everybody wants to know what to do about it and I'm sort of throwing it back and saying that we can't answer those questions we've infiltrated now we're in we're sitting here on the stage together talking to you so we have opened up those doors within the institutions at this point now it is time for you to begin to have your voices heard within those institutions I mean I wrote institutional time in the hopes that it would help empower young people and professors and people who feel dissatisfied to fucking open your mouths so what you need to do is to buy the book and maybe begin to get a roadmap for your voice a couple more questions we'll take two or three more questions short please I'm a Pratt alum Jennifer Mack I'm a Pratt alum and I'm an art educator I teach art in Harlem and K through 12 I'm interested in if there is a lack of color that exists within the institution of the art schools and the museums what are ways to inspire and what approaches did you use in your classes to inspire people of color and females to be included and feel like art is important after art school and probably even K-12 how do you inspire one of the things I was actually interested in was whether or not my pedagogical methods would be useful also to young artists of color and at Vanderbilt we discovered that they were I mean it was there was no issue but in terms of K-12 there's a book I would suggest to you called Rethinking Curriculum in Art by Marilyn Stewart and Sydney Walker because it's in K-12 that issues of gender diversity content in curriculum are being addressed there are it's really useful thank you we have one more question I was going to say don't forget the K-12 dinner party curriculum yes you can download at Penn State one more okay yeah hi thank you who are you? I flew in from the Netherlands where I live also to take part in this conference rewriting narratives of contemporary mothers I am an artist visual and performance artist and I have began something in the Netherlands a project research project called mother voices or M in brackets are the voices mother voices maternal the maternal as an attitude maternal thinking and the production of time and knowledge and this is a project I'm an artist I'm also a mother and a project that has been kind of growing long inside me and it was only last year when an A institution within the Netherlands who got a wonderful new director a woman director said we are going to do this we are really going to start this project do you have a question? I have a question well actually I did have a question when I first time walked up here and it was to ask about something what Jasmine said earlier on thoughts and what advice and thoughts on the relationship between motherhood and mother artist and feminist art but when I heard you say everybody wants us to give the answer we don't have the answer I actually just want to say what you said back if you want to have a voice you just have to fight so that's something that I'm going to take with me to exercise the voice do you even know about mother birth rights in Manchester? birth rights is the only organization in the world devoted to showing and collecting art on the subject of birth and motherhood and one of the things that has really stymied women is not making connections and not networking and reinventing the wheel so I mean again you want to have a voice that would seem to me one of the ways of doing that is to create a worldwide network that has begun happening like the snowball effect since this project began so I mean I could see that as a good a good wedge into the patriarchal institutions and actually one of the most potent images of birth I'd ever seen I included one of the paintings in one of my books was by a guy thank you everybody very much