 Welcome, my name is Elizabeth Sackler and I'm welcome to give you the space after center for feminist art and the forum. We have been doing seven, we're going into our eighth year of a very progressive program, excellent program. And we have redone our website and if you go on to brooklymuseum.org slash EASCFA, EASCFA slash video, you'll be able to pull up participants by year, by keywords, and I think you will enjoy artists, writers, philosophers, activists, feminist, male and female, and it's wonderful, so I invite you to do that. Not only is the Sackler Center doing beautifully, but the whole museum, as you can see, is doing beautifully. We have Swoon, we have Judy, we have Highway Away, we have Witness. We are really a wonderful place for artists and for exhibitions that address issues that we hear about, and they're exciting and beautiful. We have a chance, if you haven't already, to go around and take a look at the different exhibitions that are throughout the museum. On June 1st, Rainie Fair is coming and she is the 2014, I'm sorry, a visiting professor at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. And she is going to be speaking the oldest of abstractions, or can abstract art be new? And if you haven't heard Rainie speak, I really encourage you to come. She, like Dale, is brilliant, and I invited her here because I felt that her knowledge about abstract art, free Chicago abstract art, would add to our contextualization of Judy's early work. She's a very exciting speaker, and so I would encourage you to be here. Also, of course, on June 5th, we have our Sackler Center first awards. We honor women who are first in their fields, who have made significant contributions. And this year, we are giving the award to Winnie McNeil for speaking to the panel. Yes, we're very excited to have Anita. We will also be screening the film Anita. It is an eating program. Tickets are flying out the door. So I would suggest that you go online or make a phone call if you want to come and get your tickets. And join us. We'll be allowed to follow them. Reception first, you'll have an opportunity to meet Anita. And then we will be screening the film. Of course, the lady, Charlene McGray, is going to be here and make special remarks about Anita. And Gloria Steinman will be here with me to give her the award. So it's going to be a very excited and very exciting meeting, and so I hope you'll join us. I met Gail Levin, our speaker today, in the last century. And we also share a birthday of the same year. So in addition to having that in common, we enjoy Asian food, which we shared upon. I think that was our first dinner, and discovered that we both have a passion for ethics. And Gail had put together an editor of a wonderful book, Ethics and the Visual Arts, and I had the pleasure of writing a chapter exploring new attitudes, which at the time was about my work in repatriation of American Indian ritualistic material. And it's a wonderful book that's still available. Gail's other book, her biography, one of her many books, her biography of Judy Chicago is on sale in the bookstore, and there will be a book signing with Gail afterwards downstairs in the bookstore. And I was thinking about Gail as an outstanding scholar. I was thinking of her this morning as a wonderful professor. I'm also the fortune of the privilege, actually, of lecturing occasionally over courses. But I also determined, after all the biographies that she has written, that biographers are goons, and I think what it takes to do a biography of a person, aside from being a really good snoop and a first grade researcher, you come to know information and to understand the course of life in a way that you of us do. And even perhaps in reading a biography, we certainly have a benefit of all that is done. But it is the biographer, in fact, who is the person who carries it, who carries that information. And it is a pleasure for us really to have Gail here to speak to us today about Judy's early works. I will read to you her bio. Gail Levin is a distinguished professor of art history, American Studies and Women's Studies at the Graduate Center and Baruch College, CUNY. The acknowledged authority on the American realist, Peter Edward Hopper. She is author of many books and articles on the artist, including the catalog of Resonate and Edward Hopper and Intimate Biography. Her work on 20th century and contemporary art has been widely published and translated. Her articles cover a wide range from the theory of artist biographies to explorations of the intersection of American and Asian cultures. She is also focused on the art of Jewish women artists in historical cultural contexts. In 2007, she co-organized the show Judy Chicago Jewish Identity at human duty in college and is the author of biographies on Judy Chicago and the Lee Krasner. And her most recent project, Teresa Bernstein, a Century in Art, includes a book, a comprehensive website, and a touring exhibition of Bernstein's art. Now you know why I say um. Levin's work has won international acclaim and her scholarship has been recognized by grants from NEH, the Goldberg Association, the Smithsonian Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, Brandeis, Harvard, and Yale universities, among many others. She has lectured internationally, including the U.S. State Department. Levin also publishes and exhibits her own photography and collages. And right now a show of her collage memoir, which is called On a Knuck Becoming an Artist, is on view through May 27th at the National Association of Women Artists in Manhattan. And I really encourage you to go. There will be also a closing reception of that exhibition on May 27th from three to five. And Yale Levin, the artist, the not artist, will be there. I think Yale won't talk about it today, but she has shared with me as maybe truth for many of us that she was discouraged by parents, some of us discouraged by teachers, others discouraged by children, others discouraged by all kinds of things, with the notion that we are not artists. And Yale finally took the lead and has produced The Body of Work, which is now an exhibition. So in addition to being a biographer guru, please welcome artist Yale Levin. And writing about Judy Chicago was very influential on my perspective in the art world and one of the great experiences in that research was getting to know Liz... and I might add getting to know Judy Chicago, whose motivation and energy and intelligence are no equal. So I'd like to share with you today my perspective and look at her career in cultural context. So I'll be looking at some of her contemporaries, most of them male, but some of them female, and also the politics of her life and times. I won't be needing that. I have been suffering since Wednesday from Laryngitis. So I have with me a written text, which I will refer to, but if my voice runs out, I have my husband poised to take over and read it and I'll just make small comments and I'll move the slides. So we will have a lecture. I did not want to be a no-show and I'm really glad you turned up and thank you for your interest. So I want to start in autumn 1957 when Judy Cohen from Chicago entered UCLA University of California, Los Angeles to major in art. She threw herself into political and social activism. She promptly attracted the attention of the FBI as I learned when I was researching her biography. And she had only a small file, but the FBI was really quite interested in her father, Arthur Cohen. You see Judy at age 13. That's her father. He had been a communist labor organizer working in the Chicago Post Office. He refused to sign a loyalty oath and the ensuing FBI investigation led him to quit his job in the post office and hastened his death in 1953 when Judy was only 13, old enough to have imbibed his concerns for social welfare and young enough not to have felt the need for teenage rebellion. I just couldn't resist this photograph of Judy at age 13 and earlier work then is in the current show which is really quite wonderful, but let's go back this far from Elizabeth Sackler's collection. I think Judy was only five years old when she made this finger painting. She was very talented early on. This was recognized. Her mother, Mae Cohen, took her to the Art Institute of Chicago's Junior School, first the school for little kids, but then she was winning lots of awards in the Junior School. Judy then was a so-called red diaper baby, meaning having communist parents or father, certainly. And she took to heart the lessons of her radical parents. That the fate of the world is not something to be trusted to authorities. Red diaper babies are said to have been especially wary of being intimidated since their passivity could confirm their parents' defeats. Going back in time, Judy's paternal grandfather, Arthur's father, Rabbi Benjamin Cohen, who immigrated to the United States from Kavana, now Kana's Lithuania, followed Judaic humanism, which is acknowledged to contain potentially radical values. And he did pass them on to his children, especially his youngest son, Arthur. And so when Arthur finished high school at the age of 16, he had to go to work to support himself. He managed to get hired as a substitute postal clerk working nights at the Chicago Post Office. They called it Our University. Among his fellow workers on the night shift, and this is Sorting Mail, right, where Arthur Goldberg, the future Labor Secretary and Supreme Court Justice, and Richard Wright, the African-American novelist, who writes about these experiences and the racism in the Post Office, which Arthur worked to eliminate in a book published posthumously called Lord Today, which is here on the screen. At the time of the stock market crash in October 1929, when the overwhelming economic turn down took its toll, radical politics made much more sense than religion to Arthur, who was just 20. It was probably at this moment of economic collapse that Arthur Cohen found the American Communist Party, which at the time championed the unemployed, protested evictions and cuts in relief aid, and led hunger marches. There were hunger lines. And often this was through in the 1930s, through the popular front. So after the 20s, the Communist Party was more demure. And it made alliances with liberal organizations. And actually, I'm showing you a 1935 Communist magazine for children called The New Pioneer. And I just discovered this by Mitchell Seporen, who was a friend in Chicago, an artist, a friend in Chicago of Arthur Cohen. I was really interested in that. So in the 30s, the Communist Party and its sympathizers grew in numbers right up until the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pack in 1939, when it started to shrink. Arthur basically exchanged one orthodoxy for another, his father's for Marxism. And here you see a Communist, that's 1929, a demonstration. I couldn't find a photo of one in Chicago, but that one's in New York. So Arthur may have rejected his father's religious calling, he certainly did, but not the clear humanitarian goals that his father drew from something called the Moussar movement, the Yeshiva, where he studied in Countess, founded that movement. And it comes away, the takeaway is the desire to make the world a better place to go out and repair the world. And I think Judy really feels that legacy. She never forgot the lesson. Though she rejected her father's political ideas in terms of the Communist Party, she moves on to, but she does work against racism during the civil rights movement, as you'll see, and she moves on to the feminist movement. So from Chicago's, excuse me, already as a UCLA freshman, Judy was attracted to socialist groups and she became the corresponding secretary of the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People at UCLA, for whom she made posters, none of which, as far as I know, have ever been found. So this early commitment anticipates her later activism. Once in LA, Judy no doubt heard about, so we're in the fall of 1957 when she arrives in September or late August. And in June, the previous June, this artist called Wallace Berman got arrested at the Ferris Gallery and made the news. And this is his later work. Just want to go back for a second. I don't know if you can see it, but there's hanging on the right side of the cross, our couples supposedly having sexual intercourse. You can see it a little bit better on his, 10 years later on this piece. So he settled down into Panga Canyon, which is where Judy will eventually be living, when he was living there. So he was there in 1963. And this is the Ferris Gallery, where also Edward Keynalt had a one-man show in 1962. And it featured an installation called Rocksies. Now you may be wondering, what does this have to do with Judy Chicago? Well, everything. Because Judy is one of the first female artists to deal with sexuality. And it was deemed so radical and so, I can remember, the initial reaction to the plates on the dinner party. And you've got to put yourself back to the time when vagina wasn't allowed as a word in the New York Times. There was no vagina monologues. You've got to go back in a time machine. So for Judy, she really grew up in Los Angeles with Wallace Berman's being arrested. And being arrested is really great for an artist because it's a lot of attention in the press. And Judy intuited very early on how to get that attention, as I will point out. So Rocksies shows a prostitute on a sewing machine table, so that when you hit the pedal, you could vibrate her gyrate, she would gyrate up and down as if she were having sex. But this time, the city authorities, because this is in greater LA, in the city of LA, they ignored the provocation. So there is the original. And the Ferris Gallery boys, Judy speaks about them. She wanted to be one of the boys, but it was virtually impossible. And they are, you can see, people like Ed Keenholz, whom I mentioned. Robert Irwin, who actually attended Judy's senior show at UCLA. Billy Al Bangston, and I'll talk about him momentarily. Craig Kaufman, Ed Moses. So this is a group which were boys, wild men, they had no women. And Judy wanted in. Now, just to tell you how radical was radical at UCLA in 1957-58 when Judy's freshman year, if you organized a Pete Seeger concert on campus, you'd get thrown out of school. That was too radical. For example, you see here Pete Seeger two years earlier than Judy's freshman year, testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. And Pete Seeger has just passed and we celebrate him and his social activism. But at the time, certainly the FBI considered him way, way too radical. So from the moment Judy begins at UCLA, she is drawn to the civil rights movement, as I mentioned. The FBI file in her chronicles her involvement with typical radical student groups. Nothing so out of the ordinary, but she's certainly following in her father's footsteps. And the FBI knew that she was her father's daughter. So we have Judy's, or at least I had Judy's letters home to her mother from college. We find her focusing on existential literature and philosophy. She made Phi Beta Kappa, actually. These were intellectual sources for many of her generation of the New Left. And the lesson of her parents' generation was that the fate of the world is not something to be entrusted to authorities. It becomes increasingly clear from her formative years that Chicago was determined to change history. Looking back years later, she recalled, Instead of college, I moved into serious art making, being affected by abstract expressionism and minimal art. I developed as an artist, but I was not satisfied because I felt I was only using part of myself. You know, there was no model for making art as a woman, except a degrading one, you know, ladies painting. And since I know so well, Edward Hopper, who was married to Josephine Hopper, the painter, I will remind you that he specifically denigrated all women artists, but especially, quote, lady flower painters. And Judy intuited that kind of prejudice, and she didn't want to be one. So when she does, through the flower, it's something else altogether. Not what Hopper meant by lady flower painting. We'll get there. So she makes a trip to New York City. Judy and Jerry Garowitz, whom she's going to eventually married, hitchhiked across from LA. She takes a year off from college, and she signs up to study painting with a man I knew, an artist I knew, and I had interviewed because he painted Edward Hopper and that's Rayfield Sawyer. And Judy was not impressed. He was not her cup of tea, you could say. She was very turned on, however, by the abstract expressionists, and when she was in New York, the Guggenheim Museum and the Frank Lloyd Wright Building just opened. She painted these two works that remain in one of her sketchbooks and show her interest in abstract art at that time. And this is Jerry Garowitz and her portrait of him. She married him in the spring of 1961, and he died in a car crash off Topanga Canyon where Wallace Berman was living in 1963. Chicago struggled to put her life back together. That's his portrait with a beard in the background. She resumed graduate studies that fall at UCLA, working as a teaching assistant. She took two courses on painting and one on sculpture. Her painting professors were Sam Amato and Elliot Elgard, who saw Judy Garowitz as she then became known, Judy Garowitz. Judy Cohen, Judy Garowitz. Judy Cohen, Garowitz, right, she became. Teachers saw her painting abstract and ambitiously on large Masonite panels, often as large as eight by four feet. Perhaps they were puzzled by her abstract yet biomorphic imagery, which came directly out of the emotional turmoil of a young widow. So look at this. Do you see her broken heart? And do you see the phallus representing her loss of her husband 10 years after her loss of her father? It's painted in a colorful, hard-edge style, which she began, however, making recognizable references to what she called phalluses, vaginas, testicles, wounds, hearts, ovaries, and other body parts. The first one here is called Bigamy, so it's her imagination of her loyalty to her dead father and her loyalty to her now dead husband. So thus she has a double vagina heart form, a broken heart and a frozen phallus. She said that subject matter was the double death of my father and my husband and the phallus was stopped in flight and prevented from uniting with the vaginal form by an inert space. It's certainly an original take. And another one of her paintings from this time is called Flight. It includes a butterfly below and on the top a double cross referring to the twin deaths of her father and her husband. And she called a third large panel painting Birth. Also from 1963, echoing the title and theme of a now well-known abstract expressionist composition by Jackson Pollock from around 1938 to 41, which was reproduced in Franco-Hara's early monograph on Pollock published in 1959, coinciding with Judy Stee in New York and her developing interest in abstract expressionism. Her image showed pelvic ovarian womb and heart shapes in bright, hard-edge patterns, despite the fact that men like Pollock had previously painted such anatomical motifs. Her work met with dismay by her instructors who gave her bees not a positive grade for graduate work. She later recounted how her male instructors felt uncomfortable with her female images and made her feel that there was something wrong with her that even threatened to throw her out of graduate school. And this one in the exhibition, Mother Superette, an acrylic abstraction on paper about which one professor remarked disdainfully, quote, it looks like breast and wombs. These negative comments led Chicago then called Garret Woods to try to suppress personal comment in her work. Although this discourse took place in the early 1960s, her male instructors responded to a powerful residue from the 1950s when the link between the twin dangers of women's uncontrolled sexuality and atomic power became established and marked popular culture from the use of the term bombshell as slang for a sexy woman to the abbreviated two-piece swimsuits named for the Bikini Islands, where a bomb dropped during the Second World War was said to have been decorated with a photo of a Hollywood sex symbol. That's a female sex symbol. But since the 1950s, the old double standard that required premarital chastity for women only was giving way to sexual liberalism. Playboy Magazine had published a roundtable discussion in 1962 in which Alexander King, an editor for Life Magazine, argued, quote, the assumption that a woman is supposed to get something out of her sexual contact, something joyful and satisfactory is a very recent idea. But this idea has been carried too far. It's becoming so that women are sitting like district attorneys to see what the man can or cannot perform. And this has put men tremendously on the defensive. It's a mistake because democracy is all right politically, but it's no good in the home, end quote. So just to remind you of women's activism at the time, there's Bella Abzug in the Women's Strike for Peace and the Call to Ban Nuclear Testing in 1962. Bella, our New York City politician. And another New York City feminist, Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. And I have to say, Judy Chicago didn't need it. But a lot of other women did. So years later, Penhouse Magazine would report that because the imagery in many early paintings and sculptures of Judy Chicago were so overtly vaginal and feminism, her male colleagues began referring to them as Judy's cunts. Such remarks horrified Chicago then. And for several years, she cooled down her directly genital imagery, producing abstracts. And I noticed some of the abstracts in the show were actually called cunts by Judy now. So this is a show, one of the few installation shots in which you can see the little in the box here called the Far Box in my mother's house and now lost to the sculpture probably destroyed by Judy Chicago. And next to it, one, so you get an idea of her color at the time. Sometime we need a much bigger early Judy Chicago show because there's a lot of work that's really fascinating. But here she's showing with the artist Ron Davis at the Ralph Nelson Gallery in a group show. And there in the background, you see her painting flight and she showed you in color as well. And I want to point out that in Los Angeles, there was a school, as it were, a group of artists like Carl Benjamin and John McLaughlin, older than Judy, who painted hard edge, clean edge, colored abstraction. And that, I think, did have an impact on all people studying art in LA, including Judy. And we could see her color and the crisp edges that's coming out of that. And then I'm just going to show you. This is her friend Lloyd Hamrell, whom would become later her second husband, but was her buddy in art school after. And Garowitz is now dead, of course. And she's going by the name Garowitz. And Garowitz came from LA, Judy from Chicago, and everybody thought she was Garowitz's, the Garowitz couple's daughter, which she didn't like. And here is one of those sculptures from this period with pink feathers and look at the twisting forms. It's more like an abstract expression of painting than it is like one of those geometric LA paintings. And another one of those paintings, I think I don't have a title for it. And these are these plaster painted sculptures. And again, Lloyd Hamrell's. And one of Judy's, which has almost Picasso-like stifling on it, those little dots. It reminds me of his glass of absinthe. Judy is nothing but well-informed about the history of art and one of the first to become informed about the history of women artists. So in art form magazine, which was then published in LA, Judy's In My Mother's House on the Left, which you saw exhibited there at the Roth Nelson Gallery, was reproduced next to Lloyd Hamrell's TF. And I think the motifs on the dinner party plates, the female genitalia motifs are already quite evident in my mother's house, house being metaphoric. Where the babies come from. Oh, it's not plaster, I misspoke it's clay. It's painted clay. So making the pages of art form, and Judy did it more than once, was indicative of her ability to attract the press. It was mentioned that she worked with an organic sexuality rendered in painted plaster. Oh, that's where I got the painted plaster from, art form. And like the color form ideas, I'm reading from a review, and it says, the sense is almost spontaneous abandon in selection. And this is a female reviewer writing, by the way. And she mentions for the most part of talking about Garowitz's work, they create fascinating tensions. And, well, so at the same time here, that Judy is showing this vaginal sort of metaphoric form. She is friendly with, you can come sit down, then you don't have to stand. She's friendly with a group of artists showing in Venice, California, who became known as the Venice Boys. And some of them, like Billy Al Bankston and Ed Moses, came right out of the Ferris Boys. And so this is a group Judy wants to show with. And there's Billy Al with the Irving Blum of Ferris Gallery. And what Billy Al is doing, and notice his forms, including the hard form, which we've seen Judy use, and the poster for the Ferris Gallery, and this mindset, the studs, they have a group show called the studs. How many women artists are going to be in that? Zero. So I interviewed Billy Al Bankston to see what he would tell me about Judy Chicago in these years. And he actually was quite willing to be interviewed, but then he told me, you can say, this is for the biography, you can say anything you want. He said, just make it up. But he was miffed because he said Judy had stolen his idea. Well, you can see the relationship, but it hardly looks like a stolen idea to me. But Judy did manage to get a lot of attention. And yeah, there's the relationship. I'd say she takes it to another realm, wouldn't you? So here are the Venice boys on vacation, and Ken Price, I thought it would be interesting to look at his work, another Los Angeles artist because of the hard edge and the way it's painted clay related to Judy's work. And another one of her friends is Larry Bell, who's related to Robert Irwin and James Terrell and the whole light color movement in Southern California. And Judy was quite good friends with Larry Bell, who will make a cameo appearance in her women's art program, which became the feminist art program at Cal State Fresno when she's doing radical things. So that's Larry Bell's work. And this is the context in which you can see these marvelous paintings that Judy did, like Fresno Fan and the Pasadena Lightsabers, the ones that are on plexiglass, though, with the luminosity, or I think related to this work. I don't say derivative from it because they're very original, but they're all part of that mindset in Southern California. And Robert Irwin, and as I said, he actually showed up at Judy's master's show, and that was a really important thing to have him show up. She was very, very happy about that being recognized. Now, I want to point out that in Southern California, you've got the whole great boycott going on in 1965. I remember hearing about it when I was just beginning college on the East Coast, but it's right out there on the West Coast. So Judy's very aware about these social protest movements, including the Black Panthers and their violence on posters. So this is in the context also of riots and ghettos of African Americans in the 60s. And now I'm showing you the work of Via Selmans, who was Judy's fellow art student at UCLA at the same time they were there. And this is when Judy's doing all those anatomical forms, the Bigamy painting I showed you, Selmans is doing a gun firing and a hot pan, a hot frying pan, and later she calms down with her ocean paintings and drawings. But she also made a box with plastic puzzle and a fur-lined top, and I think that's very much related to Judy's games set, which are in the show. And it's also related to Merritt Oppenheim's fur-lined T-Cup, which is at Mo Man, very famous. Merritt Oppenheim was a woman artist, so very famous to all up-and-coming women artists. But more important is the physical fact of LA. Remember Judy comes from Chicago where she would take public transportation and suddenly she's in a city where the car rules and the highway. And the style is called Fetish Finish. In the 1960s Los Angeles automobile fans decorated their cars and this in turn influenced artists. And we have Ed Rouchet, who is one of the Ferris boys, showing in 1962 a little book of prints of 26 gas stations, gasoline stations later. And at the same time he also does this somewhat hopper-esque standard oil gas station based on one of the images in his book. And Joe Good, another artist Judy was friendly with, did a whole calendar with every month a car image. So then we get to Judy Chicago's car hood from 1964. And this is recently bought at auction in the last few years by the Moderna Musee in Stockholm, Sweden. And Judy went in order to paint this to auto body school, auto painting school, where she learned to put on spray paint and she attended with Lloyd Hamerl. She was the only woman you can imagine in the class. And she said they made me wear a mother-hubbard type of smock. She says a lot more, but I'm going to let you read it in my biography. But she said that the vaginal form on this car hood penetrated by a phallic arrow was a very clear symbol of my state of mind at the time. And she said also, I put my very sexually feminine images on this car hood, which is in itself quite a symbol. Over the next few years, I retreated from that kind of subject matter because it had been met with great ridicule. So there was no radical departure, she says, just a slow moving away from content-oriented work to a more formalist stance and then much later a slow moving back. And I think she really sums up what we can see in her work there. And she was able to show car hood in 1965 with a lot of the male artists in a group show at the La Jolla Museum, which had only six other women. Judy had a lot of good fortune in being recognized and showing this early work. She began to, she also went to boat building school where she learned to cast in fiberglass. She was absolutely fearless. There was a technique she wanted to know. She just went about learning it. And she thought the fiberglass pieces would be clean, simpler, sprayed and look like me, she wrote. She was so broke then that she was faced with finding a job for a month so she could afford to buy a spray gun and a compressor. So here is the work from her first solo show at the Walth Nelson Gallery in Los Angeles, which opened in January 1966 and she earned positive reviews in Art Forum where her friend John Copeland was editor and in Art News, which was edited out of New York. Her show was presented in two sequential installations. The first was called Sunset Squares, which you see here. And they could be rearranged as you see. And the second was called Rainbow Picket and is outside here in Painted Wood. Judy wasn't able to preserve all of this early work because it's expensive to house all of this and she wasn't able to sell it when she first made it. That's a different story today. So Rainbow Picket, which is outside here, was actually named according to Judy for the African American soul music performer Wilson Picket. And I think the rainbow is Judy's maybe allusion to the rainbow coalition and to the civil rights movement, avant la lettre, before it became common speak. But it's been written about as if she wrote Picket with one T as if a picket fence and it's definitely not that. But what struck me recently is that this all happens in the context in Los Angeles of the Watts riot of African Americans living in poverty and that Judy is making allusions to that in the complexity of her choices. However, she said, I'm looking for a way to make sculpture as direct as a Frank Stella painting. I'm finished with the kind of surface and craft preoccupation of the Ferris boys. And Peter Plagans, who reviewed his thought that her sunset squares, this one, was its own man, he said, so to speak, but who has been freely ingesting the work of, say, Robert Morris, and I'm showing you here, Donald Judd and who in turn, the men, owe a great deal to the later sculpture of David Smith and a few painters. But he found fault in what he called a touch of elegance in the assignment of its floor positions when he said it should just plunk be there. The next month he reviewed Rainbow Picket, he found it more engaging, but claimed it lost some of the vulgar power of the squares because of the sweet flatness of color, assert effectiveness of the physical form, but I think it's the pastel colors that separate it from what the guys were doing and make it so original. And I think it stands up very well. Now here is Judy Garowitz posing with the work also in the show, but you'll notice on the label she now calls it Trinity, so in the archival photograph across the way she does mention that she originally called it Lilith. And by naming her sculpture after Lilith, an aspect of a great goddess who was demonized for being an independent female, she calls attention to the Sumerian goddess of more than 2,000 years ago and who became the consort of God in Kabbalism as late as the 18th century. Having experienced negative stereotypes of women far too often, Garowitz may have found attractive, the subversive image of the beautiful seductress who joined lonely men in their nocturnal unrest, enjoyed sex with them and bore them demonic offspring. So there is a medieval reference to Lilith as the first wife of Adam which portrays her as refusing to assume obsesurion role to Adam during sexual intercourse and deserting him, going on to mate with other demons. God answering Adam's plea to bring Lilith back sent three angels in pursuit of her. And this led to the practice of protecting a mother and her newborn child from Lilith with the help of three angels. Thus, this is the link to the name Garowitz chose for her sculpture with its three forms which ironically she seems to have forgotten when she renamed the piece Trinity and showed it in the big minimal art show at Los Angeles Mocha in 2004. So she's resisted returning the piece to its original title which I like much better. In 1966, here you see her again, Garowitz began to produce temporary collaborative works. She was working together with Lloyd Hamerl and sometimes another male artist. She saw it, she said, to move the art out of the studio and into the industrial environment. And to do so she made minimal like looking compositions but she made them out of dry ice so they were instantly vaporizing and disappearing. And she stressed in an interview that technology was not a means to an end and only by moving out of the studio into the factory and ultimately into suitable public spaces can the artist hope to affect society. And this early commitment to affect society I think goes right to her earlier work in the civil rights movement and her consciousness of her father's teachings. So there you, oh Eric Orr is one of the other collaborators and they made Time Magazine. Then Judy with the same group is collaborating. They rent, the old Walf Nelson is now closed his gallery, they rent the space and they fill it with feathers, chicken feathers and create an environment. And they got very good press and they said that only by controlling the environment could they really reach their peak effect. But the Pasadena art newspaper and this shows you Judy's knack reviewed it with the caption, girl with pluck. Pasadena artist Judy Garowitz surveys her plastic wall chicken feather room and they claim the group was Hamerl, Eric Orr and Roger Zimmerman and of course Garowitz that they were working on the environmental movement and art which seeks to create an environment which envelops and involves the spectator rather than let the spectator be passive in order to appreciate the work. And there you see the girl with pluck. At the same time now the Vietnam War is getting into high gear and together with Lloyd Hamerl and Mark DeSuvaro, our New York artist now, Judy worked on a very famous protest against the Vietnam War erecting a peace tower right in L.A. at La Siena and Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, a tubular steel structure surrounded by panels by 400 artists including Eva Hesse, Don Judd, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Nancy Sparrow and yet Garowitz's anti-war activities are pretty much eclipsed by what would follow but long a couple, she and Lloyd Hamerl married that summer but she did not take his name. She stayed Judy Garowitz. She began teaching, oh so there you see her with Mark DeSuvaro and Lloyd Hamerl in the background and there Hamerl, no sorry, DeSuvaro goes up to British Columbia, he goes to Canada like many anti-war protesters and Judy and Lloyd go up to visit him and this is a photo taken by Lloyd when they're out off Vancouver just to remind you of the massive demonstrations against the war and 1967 film which I think is related to Judy's work and that's the graduate, didn't any of you see it and do you remember when they asked him what he's gonna do after graduation, you remember what he says, plastics and what is Judy working in at this time? Plastics, it was very big in LA presumably the film was made so we have the plastic of Robert Irwin and we have Judy's domes which are in the exhibition and of course they have anatomical references for Judy. We have her game pieces which are also acrylic, a kind of plastic and we have her male contemporaries like Craig Kaufman also working in LA with plastic and I'll remind you of the Miss America pageant and the protest outside of the sexism in 1968 and inside some of the protesters protesting the Vietnam War and I want to remind you that very radical feminists somewhat disturbed Valerie Solanas who spoke out in her book The Scum Manifesto, the society for cutting up men manifesto against the absence of great women artists of course attacks Andy Warhol who did manage to survive so things are getting very out of hand it's a time of violence with the assassination of Robert Kennedy following JFK and of Martin Luther King very tragic time in American history more protests against the war Edward Keenholz who was doing the sexuality at Roxy's has now made the portable war memorial based on the Joe Rosenthal photograph and Judy comes up with the idea that she's going to make atmospheres and feminize the environment through smoke pieces which she did in 1969 at Brookside Park in Pasadena which she later described as flares of colored smoke out of doors in the landscape they're all about the releasing of energy and she also stated that her aim was to transform and soften, feminize the environment and these link to her paintings in the show the Pasadena lifesavers and she performed at the an atmosphere at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1969 these are some historic photographs and recently recreated one of her pieces here in Brooklyn and again some have viewed her atmospheres as linking to the Southern California light and space movement including works such as Robert Irwin's scene here and these are the Pasadena lifesavers that are similar or if not the exact ones in the show by then she has Kate Millet publishing her book Sexual Politics Kate Millet is also a sculptor and this is the Alice Neal portrait of Kate Millet and Alice Neal comes into Judy's life as one of the supporters of bringing the dinner party a bit later to Brooklyn Judy began teaching at Fresno State College in January 1970 and not long after she decided to change her name from Judy Garowitz to Judy Chicago her dealer in LA used to call her Judy from Chicago and it's the time of Wanda West Coast and Robert Indiana and she had this and still has a bit of a Chicago accent so the step seemed very reasonable she did it legally and she got a friend the photographer Jerry McMillan who had the idea to document her name change with her posing as a boxer and set it up at a real boxing ring and that became the announcement of her show at Cal State Fullerton and also an ad in December 1970 Art Forum and she had two ads in the other one earlier October she Judy Garowitz and did this as in the show hereby divest herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance and freely chooses her own name Judy Chicago so her name change announcement she began her pioneering art program for women that autumn she had a growing sense the dominant male attitudes inhibited women from expressing their female perspective in art and so she got permission to take her class off campus to a separate study space just for women and she had 15 recruits and they wanted to escape the presence and expectations of men she wanted to turn women artists into artists and not artist wives and the mistresses of artists which is what they usually became now she ran into here you see the girls doing a performance there was a lot of performance art there called the cock and con play which Judy wrote and it was an index to her memoir through the flower and this was a collaborative work which I really love in which they spoofed the Miss America and beauty pageants in the United States but it's Miss Chicago and the California girls but she ran into problems because there was a lot of consciousness raising and psychological exploration so she calls in women artists that she thinks is going to help her and that's Miriam Shapiro whom you see here and Miriam visits Cal Arts and the girls who do a lot of performance dress her up as a Victorian woman and take this photograph which she later used on an exhibition catalog it's a photo by the artist Doria Atlantis who was in the class and Judy takes as many of the women who want to go to Cal Arts with her and but here you see them still performing in Fresno this is before Cindy Sherman that they're dressing up and taking photographs of themselves and there is a very famous wrap weekend at the end of the year in April 1971 and for that Miriam Shapiro with her husband the Dean of Cal Arts Paul Brock attend along with you see the late Paula Harper an art historian and Judy and Miriam come up with the idea to move Judy's program of feminist teaching for artists to Cal Arts and call it the feminist art program and Paula Harper has the idea that they should transform a house and interrogate the life of the housewife but in the meantime I want to show you what Judy's painting which is in the exhibition I don't think you would ever know it just to look at this painting it's just luscious beautiful colored light very Southern California but it's happening Fresno fans at exactly the same time that she and her students in Miriam Shapiro and some other artists like Wanda West Coast are doing woman house transforming a house about to be demolished she makes all the girls both in Fresno and LA wear combat boots and learn construction skills very useful for being an artist and lots more performance there's the nurturing kitchen where the eggs morph into breasts and the different artists they got national publicity there's the linen closet the bridal staircase etc and the menstruation bathroom which is Judy's own contribution to woman house that had over 10,000 visitors in the few weeks it remained open just over a month but Judy is doing those abstract paintings she's also by the next year doing these much more radical offset lithographs and I think you can relate it to menstruation bathroom but also to via Selman's and the radical Black Panthers use of gun imagery Judy and Miriam speak at the Corcoran conference for women and Judy meets Arlene Raven at this conference she renames Arlene Rubin, Arlene Raven and Raven moves to work with Judy Chicago and there she is on the left and they found virtually the women's building in Los Angeles and there you see with Sheila DeBretville and they have the women's studio workshop Sheila DeBretville they are in the left and Arlene Raven over here on the right and Sheila is a graphic designer and the women's building and the women's studio workshop were very significant in their influence at the time so there's Judy with Lloyd Hamrell to whom she is now married and we have in the show from the Great Ladies series we have Queen Victoria and Christina, Queen Christina now these seem just to be abstract paintings but she's getting back to her physical imagery and re-incarnation triptych as well which emphasizes autobiography history, biography and autobiography in 1973 Judy is one of the best red artists, I think she allowed me cooperated on her biography because she's a fan of biographies which she was reading to find out about women in history she's extremely well read there are references to biography then in that piece well let it all hang out is this one in the show? not in the show but a related work is in the show which I'm going to show you momentarily but this is I think quite related to women's interest in women's anatomy and sexuality which is widespread now and there's a very famous book, some of you may know it Our Bodies, Ourselves which came out in a second edition in 1973 and that's what Judy was after here and Barbara Smith in Women's Space magazine said this seems to be a most ecstatic orgasmic image more expressive than anything I've seen of hers so this one is in the show Heaven is for white men only, also from 1973 and Judy did have earlier at UCLA a very important African American boyfriend who also wrote a memoir and it's very interesting to compare their memoirs of each other which I do in the biography and her series of rejection drawings peeling back and we get to Through the Flower which is in the show and which she chose for the cover of Through the Flower her memoir first published in 1975 where she was encouraged by a mentor and Anais Nien who's famous we published The Delta of Venus I will say Judy goes to Europe and she visits the Matisse Chapel and the Picasso Museum and she decides she wants something as ambitious as Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel and she's already now coming up with ideas about women in theater for what is going to become the dinner party and she starts to do to study a new technique China painting which has been done by women and basically we end up with the dinner party where she is thinking about Leonardo's Last Supper and the Last Supper but from the point of view of the women whom she said did the cooking but I think that the Last Supper is also of course a satyr, the Jewish Passover satyr and this is a photograph Judy saved of her father's family that's her father Arthur Cohen with the little boy second from the right with the little cap on and all Judy's aunts and uncles and this is a treasure that remains with her and so we can remember Judy wanted the plates at the last wing of the dinner party to rise up in liberation because the Jews are liberated from being slaves in Egypt to being free but it's also women who needed to be emancipated and so that becomes the theme of the dinner party and you can see how it interrelates to see exactly how it interrelates with Judy's connection to her father to social activism I see it as an unbroken movement forward if you have questions I'll answer if anyone has questions if Gail is available to answer questions don't forget that there will be a book signing downstairs afterwards this was absolutely terrific Gail thank you very much the contextualization was really extraordinary I want to mention that if you'd like to be more involved with the Sackler Center you can join the Center for Feminist Art the Council for Feminist Art and we have brochures on the back with Jess who is our program coordinator and this is a postcard also back there which will give you an image of the work that Gail has now on exhibition downtown this was really superb Gail please come and ask any questions you'd like yes, John in some longer versions of this talk there's one important protest against Vietnam which didn't get into this version but it involves the Sackler Center itself your own courage and your own you're out there as part of the protest and that's part of the story even if you get into this version there was an illusion to it thank you, John this is just a tiny question why do you think she chose Wilson Pickett I have a suggestion I know he died in an airplane accident but it wasn't before or after that that's a very good question obviously he's somebody whose music she liked very much and he's African American and part of Motown and that could be a memorial but I don't know the date I'll look that up, thank you are there any other questions now? oh, right here yeah, on permanent view thanks to Elizabeth Sackler, don't miss it yeah, it's on view with you're in for a treat and it's a beautiful new installation by a woman architect, it's gorgeous I just wanted to say that this was the most illuminating lecture at an introduction I can't wait to get inside and just not look at the surface of all these loose like things and read more about it thank you very much anybody else? thank you for coming