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SAY IT, DON’T SPRAY IT
Judy Chicago did both for her “Holocaust Project” exhibition which included Cartoon for The Fall.
Photo: Donald Woodman
Spertus in the News
NATIVE RANTS
A biographer reveals the inspiration behind artist Judy Chicago's "Holocaust Project."
By Leah Pietrusiak
Time Out Chicago
Issue 111: April 12–18, 2007
Artist Judy Chicago attended Lakeview High in the early 1950s, when Chicago schools were being desegregated. But attitudes were slow to change. One of her classmates, interviewed by Gail Levin, author of Becoming Judy Chicago: A Biography of the Artist, recalled a teacher who would point to New York on a map and say "Most Jews live in New York. I hate New York."
Levin says it was instances like this that inspired Chicago (born Judith Syliva Cohen), now 67, to create one of her best-known works, "The Holocaust Project: From Darkness Into Light," which debuted at the Spertus Museum in 1993, eight years after Chicago and her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, began work on it. Theexhibit toured the country and parts of it are now on view through July 6 at the Hebrew Union College in New York.
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Sunday 15, Levin will share insights from her research, which included interviews with the artist, her family, friends and classmates, at the Spertus. This illustrated talk will survey the artist's youth in Chicago, delve into her early work in the civil rights movement at UCLA, and explore how Chicago embraced the lessons of her father, a rabbi, to fight injustices against all people; it also will address the controversies associated with trying to depict the Holocaust and its relevance in the contemporary world.
"'The Holocaust Project' was often misunderstood—[people thought] that it was a quiet memorial—but it was to get people to talk…it addresses many victims of the Holocaust, like Gypsies, homosexuals, lesbians," Levin says. "She asks her audience to think of the ways we treat other people around the world—like in Darfur today…it's about the inhumanity of humankind."
In Becoming Judy Chicago, Levin tells how the artist’s father, Arthur Cohen, worked at the post office at Canal and Van Buren Streets along with novelist Richard Wright. Levin cites Wright’s descriptions of racism there, explaining how this experience motivated Cohen—and later, his daughter—to become involved in civil rights efforts. In her monumental work, "The Dinner Party" (1979), a reinterpretation of the Last Supper from the point of view of the women who prepared it, Chicago focused on women's "erased" history; the piece is now on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum. Levin notes that the similarly controversial "Holocaust Project" concluded on a "very hopeful note"—with people from all cultures sitting around the table and a woman giving a blessing.
While Chicago, now a resident of New Mexico, had attended classes at the Art Institute since she was five years old, she did not receive a scholarship to the college and moved out of town in 1958 to attend UCLA. It was in Los Angeles that she received the name Judy Chicago, bestowed on her by her gallery rep for her heavy Chicago accent, which, Levin says, she still has today.
Gail Levin presents an illustrated talk on Becoming Judy Chicago: A Biography of the Artist at the Spertus Museum Sunday 15. See Around Town. Books are available at Spertus.
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