 Good evening everybody. It's a pleasure to have you here. I'm Elizabeth Sackler, the name up there, and oh, that's not necessary, but thank you. I also have the great pleasure of being chair of this wonderful museum, and this is a very special occasion, so I'm delighted that you're here, and I'm also going to tell you that I'm going completely off script. Because we have an opportunity that doesn't happen very often, and the last time it happened was eight years ago. Actually when the Sackler Center opened, for the first time, opened its doors. So I am, before I go on to script, I'm going to ask Arnold Lehman, our wonderful director, if he would kindly join me up here. Thank you, and Arnold, who has made this museum for Brooklyn, all that it is Brooklyn, is retiring this year. So I'm delighted to have him here with me at this moment, and also delighted to ask Judy to join me on the stage, and the reason I would like her to join us is because the three of us haven't been together up here for a number of years, and I have some fireworks, flowers for Judy. Thank you, Elizabeth. Thank you so much. Arnold, would you like to say a few words before we embark on the program? Only that, what you're going to see this evening, with you all seated in nice comfortable seats, no rain, no threatening skies, no Judy, Chicago screaming at the top of her lungs from the top of a lift, no 10,000 people and kids gathering around in Prospect Park. Just think for a moment and put yourself in that place instead of being here so comfortably, and that would give you a better idea of what went on the days ahead of that and that wonderful day. So without further ado... Yes, without further ado, I'm giving this back to Elizabeth and her script, and I'm going off stage. I just want to say that my lifelong dream of overcoming the erasure that the dinner party recounts was accomplished thanks to Elizabeth Sackler and Arnold Layman. And as we all agreed at dinner the other night, celebrating Arnold's retirement, it will be really hard for anybody to fill his shoes. It's true. So thank you all for being here. We are this evening going to be watching Judy Chicago on fire, and for those of you who know Judy, you know she's always on fire. But in this particular time, we're going to be looking at her pyrotechnic work, which was as Arnold had said, Butterfly for Brooklyn, which was extraordinary. And I could tell you a whole other bunch of anecdotes, but I think we want to thank Kate Amond, who is the editor, film editor, and the director of photography, Joan Churchill is here, and really delighted that Glenn Adamson is with us this evening from the Museum of Art and Design to run the panel after the screening, and I would like to thank the Dopkin Family Foundation, because it was the Dopkin Family Foundation that actually made this incredible event possible, and the film that you're about to see. I would like to say that this, things sort of always begin, there's always an interesting backstory, I guess, and most people don't talk about it, but it sort of began out in New Mexico with Judy and Barbara, and I sitting around and talking about what might be a really fun thing to do, and you're going to see it. And actually, Judy did all the work, and Barbara did all the work, and I've just had the fun of introducing everybody and saying thank you very much to all of you for so much beauty and celebration of life, and of art, and of all things great, and I thank you, Judy, very much. So I'm going to read Glenn Adamson's bio. He is the Nanette Laidman director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. He was until autumn of 2013, head of research at the Victorian Albert, where he was active as curator, historian, and theorist. His publications include Thinking Through Craft in 2007, The Craft Reader 2010, Invention of Craft 2013, and Postmodern Style and Subversion 1970 to 1990, which was published in 2011. He is also the co-founder and editor of the Tri-Annual Journal of Modern Craft, and now you know why he is the director of the Museum of Arts and Design. Please join me in welcoming Glenn Adamson, and thank you, and have a wonderful evening. Thank you very much, Elizabeth. Can I have another warm round of applause for the three graces of Brooklyn that we just had on stage? That was absolutely extraordinary, and it's such an honor to be here with you tonight, to have traveled over from Manhattan to this great institution. I think always a very special recognition when one museum invites the director of another museum to be present at an event, and it suggests that something important is happening, and certainly that is true tonight because we're having the extraordinary unveiling of this film. I'm not going to say much, but I do want to ask a question of the audience. How many of you were actually present for Butterfly for Brooklyn last year? Okay, and you're now all dry, which is great to see, and if you were there, and indeed if you weren't, you're about to learn it from this wonderful film, you know that there was a divine intervention that made the eventual realization of this pyrotechnic, sculptural work of genius of Judy Chicago as possible, and it looked like it might not happen, and then it did, and so somewhere up there someone is smiling on the works of Judy Chicago, which is only as it should be. So what we are going to do for the rest of this evening is first watch this great film, and then we are going to be, or I am going to be joined on stage of course by Judy herself, also by Kate Amund, who was just mentioned, who was the lead editor for the film, and she'll talk a little bit as well about the team that brought the film into existence. We'll also have with us Chris Souza, who was one of the main pyrotechnicians that worked with Judy on the butterfly for Brooklyn, and I think both, we'll certainly talk about this, both the film and the pyrotechnics themselves were of course the work of many hands, and we will be recognizing the teams that brought these artistic gestures into being, and we'll also, I'm very happy to say, be joined by Donald Woodman, who is Judy's partner, and an absolutely essential component and agent of everything that happened on that magical day, and you'll also be introduced to him in the film, and I think he actually has the best lines, if I remember rightly. So at any rate, we'll be joined by those four folks on stage after the film, and with that I will allow you to sit back in your seats, settle in and enjoy the show. So they're not going to start laying fireworks till Wednesday, is that it? That's what I understand. But the lines are on here? Everything is, the butterfly is laid out, the veins are laid in, and they can cut them at three foot intervals. How far from the edge of the image do the veins have to stop? We can have a conversation with Chris. Hi, so I'm waiting to say hi to you, because he loves the dinner party. It's been to see you. Hello. We're here playing, you coming on Saturday? Yeah. We're scouting out for different cool places to watch in. Anywhere along here, all the way around. They said that it would be easy to watch them up high, so what they can do is watch them from over there. Yeah, all right, so pick your spot. We will, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your time. Okay. In 2014, Judy Chicago celebrated her 75th birthday. Hi Rusty. There were exhibitions and events around the country honoring Judy's 50-year career. The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum presented the exhibition Chicago in LA, Judy Chicago's early work 1963 to 74. Judy was invited to present a butterfly for Brooklyn, a fireworks piece in nearby Prospect Park. I waited 40 years to do this piece. It's at a level that I only dreamed of in 1974. I mean, the complexity and duration of this piece, the multiplicity of fireworks effects, is the most complex that I've ever done, so I'm really terrified and excited. Between 1968 and 1974, Chicago executed a series of increasingly complex fireworks pieces that involved performances around California and the West Coast. It was a time when I could just go out and buy fireworks, get a group of my friends, and we'd all go to the beach or to the park or to the national forest. And my goal, looking back, I can see that what I was trying to do with these colored smokes at the end of the fireworks, there'd be this incredible colored soft haze. I was trying to soften or feminize the atmosphere and to make a female-centered environment. Said it was a conspiracy of the Koch brothers. Donald promised me there would be no rain. Okay, so what this is, is he's showing how he, Chris is showing how he laid out the minds, and they're going on an angle. Instead of shooting the fireworks straight up in the sky, they're angling horizontally. So that it goes with the form. So in other words, it's going to feel like the butterfly wings, because there's nothing, there's nothing in the center right now. So it's going to feel like the wings are going like this. I mean, this is what we've been working on for like months and months and months, like how to make the fireworks activate the form. In 1974, Chicago was commissioned by the Oakland Museum to present the monumental A Butterfly for Oakland on the shores of Lake Merritt as part of the sculpture in the city project. By then she'd become interested in creating representational images with fireworks involving Lance work, a labor-intensive process of building a framework to support the fireworks. Although the piece was wildly successful, there was no financial support to continue this work. So Judy was forced to abandon pyrotechnics. For the next four decades, Judy Chicago struggled to make a place for herself in the male-dominated art world. She wanted to be herself as a woman in her work, something she couldn't do in her early career, at least not if she wanted to be taken seriously, especially in Los Angeles, which was particularly inhospitable to women artists. I was very isolated as a woman artist, and I turned to the past. The more I studied, the more I realized that even though women achieved, those achievements would be erased the next decade, the next generation. I wanted to challenge that process, to end that process, to honor those achievements, and to introduce them into the society through a work of art that would symbolize our heritage so that those achievements could never be erased from history again. The butterfly has been a motif in my work from my earliest days. It was in my early graduate school paintings that my professors hated. I suppressed it. It came back. Every time it came back, I encountered rejection and resistance. I brought it back in the dinner party. Okay, you walk in this way. I was trying to create images of female agency. Do you remember how we all learned in school the history of Western civilization through a series of male heroes? Okay, so the dinner party recasts that with female heroes, but they're the same exact periods of history that we all learned. Each of the wings of the table represent one whole period of history, and the female figures represented on the plate, and then the runners represent something about her time period. The last wing of the table is called from the American Revolution to the Women's Revolution, and slowly the images on the plates are rising up as a metaphor for women's increasing struggle to, as I say, get the hell off the plates. In 2012, as part of the Pacific Standard Time Performance Festival, Judy was invited to create new fireworks pieces, her first in 40 years. Working with the sixth generation fireworks family, Pyro Spectaculars, she created a butterfly for Pomona, a gigantic butterfly form that filled the football field at Pomona College and was viewed by 2,200 people. The scaffold right at the bottom of the center line. In a butterfly for Brooklyn, Chicago again worked with Chris Souza of Pyro Spectaculars. To present an even more elaborate undertaking, her first in the New York area. Do you want to dance? Stop it. Funny thing, there's something at the top there that is not the same on those. That's the point we saw in the photo. Well, can't we push it out a little bit? Well, we can. To compensate? So the end where Rusty is, that needs to come, it needs to taper down that way. Yeah, that one, yeah, that's too high. Yeah, right there. That's too, that one's too high. This one's too high. Don't hit your finger. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good. That's a hell of a lot better. Way better. Yeah, okay, fine. These are purple. And they can't have these kind of things. They need to be smooth and consistent. We did that in like 20 minutes or less. And look at this. This is just hideous. These canessing cables. That'll, they go right across the lights. All right, so let's pick a line you're going to fire up. Yeah, okay. Here's a question. How many pieces of fireworks? I said thousands. It's thousands. So if we've got 15 times four is 60 times 10. That's 600 times four. 2400 lines, 1100 flares, 536 comets. I like the word thousands. Thousands. When I said thousands, I made it up. 20 seconds. We're all looking at this storm that's swirling around us. Low clouds. We've had everything today. Rain, clouds, rainbows, sun, rain, clouds, rainbows. Careful, everybody has to be out of the way. Cargo says go. Uncomfortable because, you know, it's not about me. What they had just witnessed was the power of art. And suddenly the chanting of my name turned into something that did mean something to me. A struggle for 50 years has been to make a place in this male dominated world of ours for the female spirit to be expressed and embraced. I reached that goal on April 26th. I'm now going to introduce our panel. It may seem slightly absurd to introduce Judy Chicago at this point to you, but I am going to in fact read this text, which is her official bio. And the reason I want to read it to you is not to let you know who Judy Chicago is because you know that very well. In fact, sometimes I think everybody in Brooklyn knows exactly who Judy Chicago is. But because it's a very beautiful text. Judy Chicago is an artist, writer, teacher and humanist whose work and life are models for an enlarged definition of art and expanded role for the artist and women's rights to freedom of expression. For more than five decades, she has remained steadfast in her commitment to the power of art as a vehicle for intellectual transformation and social change and to women's rights to engage in the highest levels of art production. I think every word of that bio is worth taking to heart. Judy Chicago, please take the stage. So the last words of that bio were art production, and that leads us neatly to Chris Sousa who indeed was one of the key figures in the production of that artwork. And I think that these days production is often like film production when we come to art. Artwork is indeed a collaborative endeavor and without people like Chris, these kinds of public spectacles and achievements would not be possible. Chris is in the fifth generation of a family of fireworks masters known worldwide as pyro spectaculars. He grew up literally in show business and is a season producer of high-profile fireworks entertainment seen by millions, including the Macy's Fourth of July Spectacular, Olympic ceremonies, Super Bowl halftime shows, international festivals, television motion pictures, music videos, and live performances. He's a fully licensed pyrotechnician with world-class training and safety, one should hope, set up techniques and show design. Chris's experience and well-rounded background serves as the foundation of the Sousa Fireworks brand exhibited in pyro spectaculars displays. Suffice to say, even if you have not heard Chris's name before, you have certainly seen his work. Chris, please come on up. Third, we have Kate Amund, who is in addition to, as you saw heavily involved in the production, post-production of this film, editor of two Oscar-winning documentary features entitled Into the Arms of Strangers and the Long Way Home and is the recipient of the International Documentary Association's inaugural award for Outstanding Achievement in Editing. She also received the 2001 America Cinema Editor's Eddie Award for Into the Arms of Strangers. Her most recent film, The Case Against Eight, was an award winner at the 2014 Sundance South by Southwest Veil and Riverrun Film Festivals. Kate's collaboration with Judy Chicago began all the way back with the dinner party and since then she has helped create many other videos about Judy's work, including Atmospheres, The Holocaust Project and Resolutions. Kate Amund was recently elected to the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and is on the faculty of the School of Cinematic Arts at USC. She has been an advisor at Sundance Institute Documentary Editing and Storytelling Lab since June 2004. Kate, please come on up. Finally, I'm going to introduce Donald Woodman and I'm now myself going to go off script because I would like this introduction to be from the heart. Donald and I have known each other only for a couple of years but I can truly call him a friend and I think he is a friend to so many that he has known, not least to Judy herself and has been right there with her for so many years making all of these things possible. I think so many times in the world of art there is a partner, often by the way a woman, who's working behind the scenes making it possible for a great artist to achieve what they do and Donald does that with more grace, good humor and elegance than anybody I have ever met. He is also an artist in his own right and a considerable one as a photographer principally. He actually has a degree in architecture but also an MFA in photography and he's worked with an extraordinary list of great names in photography over the years including Ezra Stoller and Minor White, Dan Margulis and also was an assistant to the painter Agnes Martin and he has been again as I say right there for so many of Judy's works including this one Holocaust Project, many others and so it's a great pleasure and I think very fitting to have Donald here with us tonight as well. Please come on up Donald. Thank you. Okay folks so we're now just going to have a short discussion for about 30 minutes and then we'll of course take your questions at the end and we're also going to have a slideshow by Chris in just a moment to give you a little bit more insight into the technical aspects of what goes into the making of a pyrotechnic display like this one but I think it's very appropriate Judy to give you the first word so can you just tell us a little bit about what that was like having 12,000 people first of all watch this extraordinary thing that you had created in the park and then to have them sing you happy birthday at the end. Well I think that I actually one of our goals with the film was to make viewers of the film understand what happened that night in the park and why it was so moving to me and so many other people and I think I express that in the film. I'd like to talk about a couple of the challenges of doing the butterfly. The first challenge well this was like maybe the last challenge other than the rain but you know when I got up on the scaffold and I said Jesus this is rickety Friday night we were doing a lighting test on the LED lights and it was dark and I was tired because I'm an old lady and I've been working way too hard and I fell off the scaffold and slit open my hand and fortunately there were all these paramedics on the team because you know anyway so I had to go to the emergency so I had this experience in Brooklyn going to the emergency at eight o'clock at night and I was there for six hours and at eight o'clock nobody was there and as the evening more on more and more people started coming including at some points police officers and I remember this one police officer who came in with this guy in shackles and he was like oh these hurt my ankles and I'm like maybe you should have thought of that before you committed whatever crime it was anyway so that was an experience and a challenge but oh and then they wanted to keep me overnight and I because my leg was swollen up I had to spend the whole day with my leg up with ice the next day but I'm like there is no way I'm staying overnight in the hospital and missing a butterfly for Brooklyn okay so that was definitely a challenge and oh and then that was why my arm was bandaged and why they had to drive me into the park and why in one of the articles they described me as frail I mean I'm old but I'm not that frail I can still like be on the treadmill for 80 minutes anyway the other big challenge and this was really this was a big challenge as you saw from some of the earlier footage of my earlier atmospheres and fireworks pieces I worked with colored smokes and by the time I came back to doing fireworks they didn't make colored smokes anymore and so when I started working with Chris one of the real aesthetic challenges was how to band aerial fireworks and put them in support of an image on the ground that was really a challenge you know what I'm talking about Chris designing the system with the mines going sideways with the wings that was like our effort to try and harness aerial fireworks and the now this is the last thing I'm going to say you know there's another person who works another artist who works with fireworks my fireworks were really for a long time not known how many years back they go there's this Chinese artist who works with fireworks and I have had to resist pointing out that his last a minute and mine last 20 not that it's a competition no it doesn't really have to do with competition Glenn it has to do with gender also I think we should introduce the people who are here actually I want to one of the things that you don't understand I was kind of upset they brought the lights up the most important part of the film of the credits because it took an enormous amount of people not only in terms of Chris's crew to do the fireworks but also to do this film and a number of people have come in from LA and from New Mexico who worked on the piece and I'd like them all to stand up because it was really hard to figure out who to give what credits to because everybody worked in different ways on this thing and I have to say this the film that you saw tonight would not have been possible if Joan Churchill and Ellen Barker hadn't stepped in they're friends of ours from LA Joan is a I'm sure well known in the documentary field as a filmmaker and if they hadn't come on board and as I was watching we were watching the Academy Awards because we're trying to see Katie come in as governor and I was thinking the only award that's given up with people come on the stage and say I couldn't have done this if so and so hadn't given me their time and volunteered everybody else gets paid but this film was done by enormous amounts of people giving their time freely to make this happen so please everybody stand up who worked on the film so we can acknowledge and the piece come on Kevin come on here and come on Helen Helen Helen Kern who actually did the editing under Katie's supervision Joan Churchill, Ellen Barker the sound on this would not you would not have heard the fireworks the crowd reaction without having someone of Ellen's talent working on the film so there are a lot of people in the background that never get the credit they're due and I really want to and the other person who's going to get upset with me but I'm going to ask her to stand up because without Eric and Barbara Dopkin this would never have happened Barbara please come on so while we're on the subject of the teamwork and the behind the scenes we now have a great opportunity here from Chris about the pyrotechnic aspect of this project and Chris has a short slideshow that he's going to speak to which will help us understand a little bit about how this magic in fact was possible okay Tim really Judy had asked me a month or so ago to kind of reflect on some of the challenges that became of this this particular project so I wrote down a few of the notes but I first wanted to you know just take this opportunity up here to thank everybody at the Brooklyn Museum Judy and Donald also for allowing pyro spectaculars to participate in this what I consider a very successful celebration of Judy Chicago's life work really looking back and seeing the video and whatnot it's amazing what we accomplished on April 26 2014 so much Donald said everybody involved it's hands down so can we have the lights down again just so we can see the slides thanks Tim go ahead and do the slide so Judy and I had worked on three fireworks pieces before we did a butterfly for Pomona and as Judy always says that a butterfly for Pomona was merely practice and a butterfly for Brooklyn had to be more complex so literally we used thousands of fireworks and they were all custom manufactured to really be in the scale of this of this form and and the object really was to try to maintain safety and everything at the same time Tim go ahead and do a slide so the film featured some of these challenges and I thought it was appropriate to bring it up that one of my most fun and challenging stages of this butterfly was doing the wing flaps with the mines and what what made this challenging is that we defied normal pyrotechnic usage we didn't shoot it straight up in the air we started doing them horizontally so with that you know we had to build a special prop calculate angles with x axis y axis z axis you know that's something you don't normally think of in fireworks art is that now we're in a three-dimensional kind of world so of course safety being the main goal these props had to be put precisely on the grid exactly as calculated to to ensure that the the distance the pyrotechnics traveled didn't go beyond the form and into the crowd itself so I just wanted to highlight that particular stage is being really one of my most fun and and favorite parts of a butterfly for Brooklyn Tim go ahead and do a slide so it's kind of a little picture there maybe some of the images as it shows out yeah okay the next one really of this project Tim go ahead and do a slide was doing the led lights for the veins now why was this a challenge well Judy and I had this idea and really that's what it was no idea other than that of how to execute it or anything else but we really wanted to do it so we source out some led rope lights and then okay how are we going to power them Donald and I are pontificating ideas and okay what colors are going to be the they're going to work best in this in this butterfly for these veins so you know we really don't have any of these answers only thing we know is we're going to do this guess what we get lucky really get lucky miraculously Kevin letterer he's a hobby holiday home light expert have you seen these youtube videos these people doing the Trans-Siberian Orchestra how this is him and he just falls into our lap I don't know where and now okay we have a realistic expectation something to formulate this plan to do these led rope lights again really no way of how we're going to execute it so we do a power test in my warehouse in California we do a color test in Judy and Donald's house in New Mexico and here we go we've got something put together and the ultimate challenge is we couldn't put all of these pieces together until the the night before the butterfly that's when we get to put the rope lights out and test all those things so we're like less than 24 hours away from this better work and uh furthermore we had inclement weather all the next day to prohibit us from other testing and of course Julie highlighted or Judy highlighted one of the most important features of that evening when she has a scary fall from a scaffold a trip to an emergency room and so on and so christ was really pissed off he's like 18 pirate technicians and they let Judy fall off the scaffold so uh needless to say I really want to finish this moment here with uh for that moment of the butterfly for Brooklyn we were winging it and lastly really uh to do uh go ahead and do a slide there Tim just see this I thought really this image of yours was the first time we'd actually seen it and it was to me like wow that was special so okay uh Tim go ahead the last challenge is really something that's obvious we had inclement weather on show day and what I wanted to highlight here is that we've done work as pirate spectacular's in New York years and years and years so we came prepared you're always going to be prepared so we bagged everything we covered everything with plastic sheeting and we you know Donald and I are just diligently monitoring what whoever's smartphone had the better weather service to see what patterns are coming over prospect park all day long until we finally decide that we're going to do it or not all the stakeholders in the museum are threatening us to postpone and again like the leds we got lucky and we get a break and here we go we we we do it we pull it off and and it was great so and an interesting conclusion I wanted to have these thoughts and share but Judy as an artist a teacher and a friend you challenged me to extend the line between impossible and possible with the butterfly for Brooklyn and uh I am forever grateful and I will cherish the memory of the day you and Donald walked into my office and we out to California so thank you everybody so let's hear it for Chris and all the makers of artworks out there just to underline the point you know I think it's so easy when you go to museums or art fairs or see public sculptures whatever the experience of art you may be having it's so easy to forget that there are people like Chris standing behind those works of art it's not just the artists the artists obviously are crucial and um centrally important but it it takes a village often to make an artwork of this scale magnitude and and magic so uh Chris it's great to hear those words from you thank you um now uh not by no means least we're gonna we're gonna hear from Kate a little bit about the film making process um and we were introduced just briefly to some of the folks out in the audience who are part of it as well Kate can you just talk a little bit about this film and perhaps some of the other projects you've done with Judy over the years oh certainly um well I actually heard Judy speak for the first time in 1974 around the butterfly for Oakland because I was in San Francisco at the time and I was determined that I was going to meet her and work with her and in 1978 I went to uh Los Angeles to volunteer on the dinner party and we've worked together ever since and as a film maker volunteered ever since be clear and um I've worked on a series several videos um in short films over the years about Judy's work and I'm sort of the keeper of the archives too but we're going to try to find a really nice vault for all those things at this point but I'm so glad that um that we have all the 16 millimeter footage of the early um atmospheres and smoke pieces that Judy did um now this particular film of course it is what it is because of this spectacular cinematography of Joan Churchill the exquisite sound by Alan Barker and the elegant editing by Helen Kearns and um I was able to you know sort of work with this in terms of creating more of a historical overview because it ended so beautifully with happy birthday and because this piece was a celebration of Judy's 75th birthday but her career and retrospective that was um happening in Brooklyn and Museums all over the place you had a lot of shows last year but it was so moving when the whole audience sang happy birthday that we thought this also could be a film where we could do a little bit of a look backwards at Judy's career a little overview and a sense of of what that moment culminated for her and so I think that's where I sort of came in was to to bring in the background um and and give it a historical perspective but the actual piece um filming the uh the fireworks I think you all can talk about much more detail than than I can well I I think Katie it's being a bit modest about it because inevitably I pick up the telephone and I call her and I say listen there's this video or this film we need to do and I need your help and uh she brings in an extraordinary team of people to work on it as I said everybody volunteering so and you being a bit modest about your role in the whole thing she can she because of the long history she gives an incredible perspective to what we do and because of her ability in filmmaking and editing she can help uh craft the storyline which otherwise wouldn't happen one of the things that's very striking about the film to me is that it does have a narrative arc and it also has a lot of tension in it which I think is a lot a lot of that is because of the weather that sort of will it happen or won't it you kind of knew the ending but it but it does have this this kind of um this kind of conflict of you know what's going to happen uh do you feel like that was something you tried to bring out in shaping the film that sense of a storyline was that intentional well I wish Helen would talk about that Helen there's a there's a microphone right over there I'm sorry to put you on the spot but you let's hear from the editor Helen Helen was the editor Helen Kearns presented itself it was it was very clear kind of from the beginning the things that stood out to me really were Judy and Donald as our stars their relationship was like really very appealing to me and they they just make such a great team that that's something I kind of wanted to highlight and you know the weather thing that was that was what was you know looming over from the very beginning from the first five minutes of footage that I was watching you know so it was pretty clear from the very beginning that that was kind of you know the the source of tension that was going on I don't know who wants to take this on from the film team but um I would be curious to hear someone talk about the moments in the film where you actually let Judy seem like a quite strict taskmaster because there's a couple of really interesting moments where I think there's one moment Donald where you you try to start dancing a minuet on top of a scaffold I'm not sure if that has anything to do with the fall and Judy said stop it and then there's another moment where Judy you sort of march around the field saying that's hideous this is wrong look at those wires what are you people doing and I thought it was very um I thought it was great that that was in the film and partly because it gives the sense of the reality and the pressure of the project but also um because it does give you this uh I don't know this feeling of of insight into the behind-the-scenes process and it's a moment of kind of human humanity so could you talk a little bit about why don't we get Joan Churchill to talk about Joan after she killed that right can I can I interject before Joan kind of does the filming side but from the practical side of this this was for us hilarious too we literally as I described didn't have very many opportunities said these led lights up we just put them out minutes before Judy shows up and that's when she's like ah we had no time to dress it I mean we didn't get it Judy proof at all before she showed up so it was I thought it was kind of hilarious to you so so there's great that it made the film yeah there's weather proofing and there's Judy proofing which is more difficult can we hear from Joan Churchill um I we we were just following Judy around and this is how Judy is and as as a filmmaker I felt you know we had gone home Alan Barker and I had left when Judy fell off the platform we weren't there and so I felt you know it was a huge loss not to have captured this in the film so I felt like it was of my failure not to have been there for that moment because I I think somehow it would have added to this this feeling of impending doom which you know we had the weather I mean it was incredible it it rained up to 10 minutes before they they took the plastic off and then of course we didn't know if anything was going to to work you know because obviously some of it it was windy and you know raining and we didn't know if it was going to work and then literally we had that half an hour window for the butterfly to take flight and then and then it poured and we just felt it was as as you say a miracle but you know New Yorkers are really tough you saw all those people coming out with umbrellas and stuff like that but no matter how tough New Yorkers are the deluge they came down 10 minutes after the peace ended nobody could have withstood and I'm like oh my god that would have been the most expensive rainstorm on the face of the earth that I mean oh my god it was so fortunate it was very amusing the next day in the New York Times they said among Judy Chicago's other accomplishments she seems to have an ability to control the weather I'm like play I like I really had something to do with that right so um we've been talking I would like to I would like to add that uh in response to your question that this is a large-scale artwork that requires a strong leader and if the leader had been a man that question might not have been asked right absolutely yeah thank you great Judy is a strong leader don't don't you forget I mean I'm tough I am tough but I wouldn't be where I am if I hadn't been tough my god impossible it all it also sets the bar high for everybody to work to and I know we've been working with Chris now for like you said on three different pieces and so you know each one is more complex and more complicated and if he said it's tough sometimes to reach that bar but if you don't set if Judy hadn't said it that high you wouldn't have tried to reach it because you know I have a different feeling about that I feel like it's really a positive thing to ask a lot from people because it gives them the opportunity to go beyond themselves and that's what I believe art is is being in the service of something bigger than us so that we can go beyond ourselves set line between the possible and the impossible what seemed impossible before and art does often get you over that line shows you another space that you could be in um just on that point Judy I did want to talk a little bit more about the art part of the butterfly for Brooklyn because we've been talking a lot about the practicalities and they are absolutely fascinating I think we all here share the value of wanting to acknowledge everybody who puts their all into the making of something like this but could could you talk a little bit about the ideas behind the butterfly for Brooklyn both the idea of creating a public so-called spectacle public artwork like this and also maybe a little bit more about pyrotechnics as an art medium as you said you're one of the few artists and perhaps the first um certainly the first I know of yeah and then we'll get and then we'll let the audience ask questions and then we'll ask what will the audience join in but can you say just a little bit about what the the kind of um ideas that led you to these kinds of works were in the first place well you know I started in at the end of the 1960s when as I said in the film I I had a group of friends we just went out and everybody did everybody worked I mean everybody either lit flares or brought food or took pictures I mean it was a very different time and I mean imagine I did a smoke piece in the national forest no I mean no yeah I'm on balding right yeah I mean those are the days where you didn't have to ask permission no permits nothing and at that time I I was interested I mean somebody I was talking about this with somebody else the other day you know in retrospect you can see a lot in terms of aesthetic impulses that you might not understand at the time you know it was a period of time where I was struggling really hard in the macho la art scene in the 60s where I couldn't be myself as a woman there was no possibility of discussing issues of gender and um I I had been working on color systems and how to create like emotion through color and I was doing all of these kind of abstract formal works because I had excised any hint of gender for my work in order to be taken seriously in the art scene and I had these color systems where I would lay out color and I had done this series of domes plastic domes in which the color would appear at different levels inside the domes and I had I was already working collaboratively I was doing artist events I did this event with two other artists in Pasadena on the night of the Rose Bowl because my studio fronted the Rose Bowl and I laid on the street I laid smoke machines and I designed a color wheel and quite by accident the color wheel was going and the smoke was rising and there were all these colored smokes in the air and it was like the color inside my domes had been liberated from their formal container and this was right at the same time as I was getting ready to make this really radical change in my art making go to Fresno start the first feminist art program try to figure out how to create a feminist art practice how to create work that was openly female centered and so the the fireworks pieces were my I think a kind of act of liberation that was ahead of my evolution at that point as an artist so I did all these smoke pieces all over Southern California and then when I was invited in 1974 to do this piece for the Oakland Museum by then I had decided to try and actually create an image with fireworks I use smoke and road flares and magnesium flares and um uh Roman candles okay the technology was entirely different and then I had to stop for a variety of reasons and now that technique of creating they they mentioned it in the film but that technique of creating an image with fireworks used to be used a lot like in 4th of July shows where they made American flags and stuff like that but it's not used hardly at all anymore you know it's all given away to these aerial fireworks so when I came back to it as I said I was having to learn a whole new language this technique of of building an image is called lancework very labor intensive and even though the technology of fireworks had changed dramatically between 1974 and 2012 lancework hadn't changed at all in fact it was hardly used Chris knew how to do it because of the tradition of their family so I came to him with the idea of picking because I wanted to pick up where I left off and move forward and so I did a butterfly for we did a butterfly propona and Tim Nye sponsored a piece on the back of his building for the show I did there in LA and I did a series of pedal forms that I learned a lot from you know in terms of the different techniques and then thanks to Eric and Barbara in the Brooklyn Museum we had the opportunity to really work at the kind of scale I had always wanted to work at in fireworks and but it was going to be you know a challenge to incorporate even more techniques and also as Chris said by that time he understood that we were trying to create an image with fireworks which was new for him too and you know that's when he came up with this idea of the mines angling the mines building a technology that could do that so would you say that because the I was struck in the film about your comment that the butterfly image had always been there oh yeah came and went from early on so there's something interesting there about the image itself but I also wanted to ask you about the concept of painting in relation to the butterfly for Brooklyn because this idea of the color being liberated the smoke being liberated out of the sculpture or painting out of a formal structure yeah so do you feel that this is continuous with your practice as a painter an image maker well actually I think myself I've gone back first of all I got an MA in before they had a face in both painting and sculpture so I've always gone back and forth between painting and sculpture and I myself think my best work is when there's a fusion of that like in the dinner party in the fireworks I think that's where my real talent lies is infusing painting and sculpture I just haven't had a lot of opportunities to do okay I think that's a good note to turn to the audience I'm sure there must be some questions out there both from those who were there last year at the event and also those who weren't so anybody with questions and please come to the microphone partly because we are we are live streaming this so this way people at home will also be able to hear the question thanks oh it's a pleasure and I want to express first of all as a as an art student many years ago not that many years ago but enough time has passed that it's a surprise and a pleasure to be present here tonight with regards to Judy Chicago and what's what's been accomplished with regards to taking art to another level I wanted to ask Judy and Chris if there are any more projects in the works that might possibly involve helping kids in the inner city maybe getting them to participate in the in the whole thing and empowering kids in inner city communities well I mean even though I wish that we would be more offered opportunities to do more work that hasn't happened what's your name by the way what do you do have you ever had a chance to work with kids as part of your production teams Judy with kids with children with children um fireworks possibly not the obvious no fireworks statutory reasons yeah I mean are you kidding you know uh no I have you've often worked with non artists if I can put it that way in other words people without formal art training yeah brought them into the art making experience but I have been concerned about the ed the education and the arts of children and you know I I worked with uh K through 12 art educators to develop a dinner party curriculum because it was of great concern to me that so many art teachers are women and they teach so little about women in schools and in art programs but I mean my focus has really been on art making yeah making images this might be a moment to plug your new book Judy because uh oh institutional time institutional time yeah my last book I published 14 books this is my public my long time publicist who was here who I worked with since he was a baby publicist and like how long ago 25 years ago 30 years ago uh uh anyway my last book was uh called institutional time and it as a critique of studio art education and um um which I'm very critical of you are yes I am other questions other questions yes who are you my name's Rachel and um you know we've danced around it but could you be explicit and talk about what made this a piece of feminist art the butterfly first of all is an ancient symbol of the goddess and of the feminine so in and of itself the symbol of the butterfly using the butterfly image and the effort over and over again in my work to build an imagery based on the butterfly what is the butterfly it's an image of agency because it can fly it can soar and we women have very few images of agency that we see in our museums and that has been my lifelong goal is to bring images of the feminine into the culture in a way that is honored in the same way that men's imagery is also I want to add to that also the process of creating this work the collaborative process the acknowledging of everybody who's involved of not jumping out in front of the camera and saying all those people in the background they they mean nothing they have nothing to do with what i'm creating and if you look at a lot of youtube videos of other artists at work you will see that is a is a whole different way of working and it's a feminist way yes and it's inclusive it's not a gender-based idea it's a value-based idea and it allows a team of men and women and everybody to contribute and reach to their highest ability to make something happen and I think that's something that doesn't that shouldn't be overlooked and the other thing feminist about it is that one of the discussions that donlan i had with barbara and eric dopkin early on was whether or not a woman artist working at the same level of aspiration as male artists have worked historically could get the same level of funding i i had a stop in 1974 because i couldn't and barbara had her own challenges in trying to find enough funding and ultimately she and eric had to provide all of it almost all of it because they were not prepared for the answer to be no and so they get a lot of credit for that it is rare to have that kind of patronage and also as elizabeth sakler is teaching us to say matronage yes this is a very interesting just parenthetically a very interesting initiative that elizabeth here at the brookland museum is spearheading to try to take the word matron which sounds to us probably all of you have this immediate association with being matronly as somehow you know you know unfashionable or otherwise it's a pejorative term and elizabeth is making the great point that the word matron should have just as positive a connotation of the word patron and that's another lurking gender bias in our language that she's trying to address which i think is great can i can i also comment see this is a little less abstract but as judy mentioned her early works it was it was sort of came to a crossroads or an ending based on gender biases but when she re regrouped with me one of the great things about us is that my mother is a pyrotechnician i think that kind of uh is what kindled ours by then my mother was like one of the first female pyrotechnicians in the world and so my understanding that the biases of male versus female didn't exist in what i do as an art form in fireworks and i think that's what really helps even these butterfly projects and the de flowering just really be a piece of feminist art as well as you know fireworks art so there's there's a lot of less abstract pieces to this as well as from just having in the butterfly for Pomona we had a 90 percent female crew and and even here in brooklyn it was a you know a large portion of female pyrotechnicians and there were no female pyrotechnicians when i was first doing fireworks actually when we walked into the office judy was telling the story of her history she because you were trying you were trying to become a pyrotechnician and she got sexually harassed out of the business chris smiled and said oh i think i know who that was okay have one more question over here anybody else yes hi i'm zoos and i want to thank you very much for all you've done to bring your work to brooklyn and um i want to ask you when you were first emerging as an artist like what did it take and who were the the key players in your emergence as an artist and i also wanted to point out that i'm particularly and deeply moved by how you uh interrupt and contradict uh sexism in your space i love that about you thank you so much oh uh i started drawing when i was three and i started going to art school when i was five and i always wanted to be an artist from the time i was a child and um i was exceedingly fortunate because i was raised in a family that believed in equal rights for women that's like the good news the bad news is they didn't tell me the rest of the world didn't share that opinion so it's kind of a shock when i went to college and i used to raise my hand to ask a question and the professor wouldn't call on me so i was like waving my hand and wait but anyway i also was very very fortunate because my father worked at night and my mother worked in the daytime and my father was very my father was home when i woke up from my afternoon naps my father was the labor organizer and a marxist and a wonderful man and um he trained me in logic he trained me in values uh he i grew up in an integrated household and my father used to play this game with me uh we had a housekeeper named already blue who is african-american and he used to play this game we're walking down the street with already blue and then we run into norman black and then we see harry at orange and what he was teaching me was that color and people that you can't judge people based on color which was reinforced by my household but when i was 13 probably the most important thing in my life happened to me my father died and this was at the height of macartheism so i was going to school and seeing these things called the weekly readers which were these poor and they would have all these blonde blue-eyed american soldiers bayonetting big horrible bloated communists and i was being confronted with the idea that my father was a terrible person from the world's point of view and at 13 i had to decide whether i would believe the world or i would believe my own experience and that that challenge helped me a lot as i grew up and encountered all this sexism and racism and resistance because i had learned to trust my own experience and without that i don't i don't i don't really think i could have survived thank you very much this was the first time anybody saw the film it was a great pleasure to us to share it with you thank you so much zeus we have a hand for this wonderful and articulate support of judy's work i just want to leave you first of all with a quick announcement just to say that this is actually just part one of judy chicago on fire so tomorrow night at mad at the museum of arts and design in columbus circle we'll be having the second part and we're going to have a very interesting evening in which we'll be seeing some of the archival films which kato alluded to and you saw excerpted in the film tonight that show some of judy's fireworks principally from the 70s and so judy will also be in dialogue tomorrow with alisa author of mad museum who is an important feminist art historian in her own right that that event actually is sold out i'm happy to say but i hope that some of you will be able to to join us then and i think that's that's that's all the announcements unless anybody on the panel has one okay um so so it just leaves me to uh yes is there something about sorry i don't i don't think we're streaming tomorrow night unfortunately but um but uh we will try to uh social media if anybody wants to see it you will go to uh through the flower dot org yeah to our website it's on there and you might um people don't always show up so yeah you you might if you're absolutely um intensely interested please come and we might be able to get you in on the door um so um so it just leaves me to thank our wonderful panel thank you all so much for your comments tonight and i just want to leave you with one thought before offering judy the opportunity to have the last word which i think would be the most appropriate thing but i just want to say that for all of the achievements of judy and all the people that have supported her this is certainly not a um this is not a done deal we do not have gender equality in the art world by any stretch of the imagination by any statistical analysis we still have a vastly lopsided um art world that we inhabit despite people like elizabeth sackler barba dob can um making it possible for people like judy to achieve what they do so let's um simultaneously have in our hearts that we are thanking judy for everything that she's accomplished but also hope that there are many judy chicago's out there uh to come who will who will continue her uh struggle thank you very much okay thanks everyone very much