Serpentine celebrates Judy Chicago

This week, Serpentine opens Revelations, an exhibition of trailblazing artist, author, educator, cultural historian and feminist Judy Chicago (b. 1939, Chicago, USA). On view at Serpentine North from 23 May to 1 September 2024 and made possible by Dior, this is the artist’s largest solo presentation in a London institution.

Chicago came to prominence in the late 1960s when she challenged the male-dominated landscape of the art world by making work that was boldly from a woman’s perspective. An artistic polymath, Chicago’s work is defined by a commitment to craft and experimentation, either through her choice of subject matter or the method and materials she employs.

Throughout her six-decade career, Chicago has contested the absence and erasure of women in the Western cultural canon, developing a distinctive visual language that gives visibility to their experiences. To this aim, Chicago has produced both individual and collaborative projects that grappled with themes of birth and creation, the social construct of masculinity, her Jewish identity, notions of power and powerlessness, extinction, and expressed her longstanding concern for climate justice.

“Revelations, both the exhibition and book, expresses my lifelong commitment to gender equality and my deeply held belief that people must come together to change the patriarchal paradigm, which—at this point in history—has become lethal to all creatures, human and nonhuman, as well as to the planet.” The artist said.

Judy Chicago: Revelations charts the full arc of Chicago’s career with a specific focus on drawing, highlighting rarely seen works. Several immersive, multi-media elements, including an AR app, a video recording booth, and other audio-visual components, set this show apart from previous surveys of Chicago’s work. With never-before-seen sketchbooks, films and slides, video interviews of participants from The Dinner Party (1974–79), audio recordings, and a guided tour of The Dinner Party by Chicago herself, this novel approach to exhibiting Chicago’s work makes the artist’s presence felt throughout the gallery.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Dior hosted a beautiful dinner to celebrate the artist in The Magazine restaurant adjacent to exhibition attended by Kristin Scott Thomas and many other important guests from the cultural and fashion spectrum.

Maria Grazia Chiuri, Creative Director of Dior women’s haute couture, ready-to-wear and accessories collections said: “The power of Judy Chicago’s work has always had, and will always have, a significant impact on both me personally – I still keenly recall her installation piece The Dinner Party, which is regarded as a masterpiece of feminism – and all generations fortunate enough to see it. She speaks about women and our history, celebrating our combined creative and intellectual strengths. I worked with Judy for The Female Divine. It was she who chose this concept to express my idea of femininity for the Dior Spring-Summer 2020 Haute Couture show. The large setting became a monumental work of art, depicting ancestral strength and natural instinct in a way that forces viewers to consider creation as a form of therapy, a love that transcends time. For this piece, Judy looked back over her own career as an activist artist, welcoming her approach as a sculptor with open arms and no qualms about managing the vast space, filling it with references to women, their bodies, their sexuality. Judy Chicago’s importance goes beyond just the history of modern art, as she also actively works for women’s empowerment. Collaborating with her was incredible, as she pushes boundaries and is constantly thinking outside of the box – she doesn’t set herself any limits, which is something I think we should all strive for as women.”

The exhibition takes its name from an unknown illuminated manuscript Chicago penned in the early 1970s which will be published for the first time in conjunction with the exhibition by Serpentine and Thames & Hudson. Titled Revelations, this visionary work is a radical retelling of human history recovering some of the stories of women that society sought to erase, and one that Chicago never imagined would be published in her lifetime. Audio excerpts from the book can be heard in each of the galleries through an accompanying audio guide, seamlessly creating a link between visual art and written word that has occupied the artist’s practice since the 1970s.

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