In 1970, a twice-married artist in her early 30s who’d been toiling in Southern California for more than a decade, and feeling overlooked by the art establishment on account of her gender, decided it was time to change her name again. This time, she wouldn’t take the name of any man; she would name herself. The change was announced via wall text in one of two shows she had in Orange County that fall and to a broader public via an advertisement in Artforum:
Judy Gerowitz hereby
divests herself of all names
imposed upon her through
male social dominance
and freely chooses her own
name: Judy Chicago
Half a century later, Judy Chicago: A Retrospective—the first career-long museum overview of the protean and vastly influential artist—debuted at San Francisco’s de Young Museum on August 28. Chicago’s work has engaged minimalism, feminism, history, religion, and the future of the planet, among other topics, via sculpture, spray paint, drawing, glasswork, needlework, pyrotechnics, and much more. A retrospective has, obviously, been a long time coming, made even longer by more than a year’s delay due to COVID-19. Chicago is now 82, and the world is catching up with her at last, with no time to waste.
By taking the name of her birthplace as her own (paging Leonardo da Vinci) rather than using that of her father or her husband, Judy Chicago seized her own place in the history of art, heralding a new time for herself and for other female artists. Chicago’s pioneering art and activism are two headline dubbed her “the Godmother.” That’s “godmother” in the sense that Chicago helped birth the feminist art movement, but maybe also in the sense of never taking no for an answer. Godmother as the Godfather.
