LETTING GO OF JUDY

 

LA County Museum of Art, circa 1972 or 1973. I was a college student at Cal State Fullerton, visiting the museum with a friend, to see an exhibit of Picasso paintings. Those works were just not my cup of tea, so I ventured into another room and viewed some paintings whose design I will call organic abstract. Around the front border of the paintings were the artist's thoughts and feelings in old style handwriting font. OMG these paintings were by a woman! I had never seen an exhibit of contemporary pieces created by a woman in a major art museum. I didn't let that moment slip from my memory.

Years passed. Many museum visits. Most of them stunningly and completely devoid of women's artwork.

After moving to the Bay Area, I finished my B.A. in Art at Sonoma State University, graduating in early 1976. The first thing I did was continue working at my job because I had a student loan to pay off which had my mother's Standing Rock Sioux reservation land as collateral. Didn't want to lose that! I was able to finish paying it back within a couple of years. 

Then in 1979 publicity began appearing about an upcoming art exhibit in San Francisco by the artist Judy Chicago, called The Dinner Party. Instantly I recognized the handwriting element of her works, and knew that this exhibit was the next big step for the artist I had seen years before at the LA museum.

The visit to The Dinner Party installation was profoundly moving. The exhibition hall was like a holy shrine to the history of women.

To my great surprise, in 1980 there was an announcement in the media that Judy Chicago would be interviewing women to help with her next endeavor, called The Birth Project. And holy cow, it was in the Bay Area. So, I nervously arrived at the time and place publicized, to see if I could be of any use to her. She gave me the outline of a design to needlepoint, which I returned to her a week or so later. Joy of joy, I was accepted and placed into a group of needlepointers, and we were assigned a massive image, called The Crowning, to stitch.

Our piece on the left

Over the next three and a half years I traveled to the Benicia studio every Saturday to spend a long day stitching on the piece. This time turned out to be, in my opinion, my unofficial M.A. in Art. I was able to observe all the hoops that Judy had to jump through, and all the people she had to schmooze in order to keep the operation going. And it took her aggressive personality to educate and inspire a gaggle of non-professional artists tasked with bringing Judy's visions to fruition.

There were warm times of solidarity between us needle artists, but there were also times of disagreements, arguments, and tears. We learned that collaboration in serious art is far from simple or easy.

 

Megan at work 

Three years into my participation in the project, I realized I should not wait any longer to have the birth experience in real life, as I was not growing any younger. I became pregnant and about a month before the baby's ETA I stopped traveling to the Benicia studio. My son Sean arrived in May of 1984, and became my new and cherished focus.

So in the subsequent thirty plus years, from time-to-time media reports about Judy would pop up, and I followed with interest her continuing artistic evolution. I produced a few photorealist paintings in the 1990's, but I allowed all the challenges of daily life to preclude me from focusing artistically. I came to realize that I was not one of those people who could laser focus on their artistic aspirations, letting nothing get in the way of attaining them. That just wasn't how I rolled.

In 2019, just before the pandemic began escalating, it was announced that there would be a Judy Chicago retrospective exhibit in San Francisco the next year. I was happy and excited for her, and joked that if an artist lived long enough, she would be awarded a retrospective. I think she was about 80 years old at that time. I planned to go see the exhibit of course. 

But the pandemic turned out to be far worse than anyone had imagined, and did not just disappear with the change of seasons. Finally, Judy's postponed retrospective was rescheduled for 2021. The pandemic has lessened with the help of the vaccines, but not as dramatically as was hoped for. With my having two serious health risk factors, the thought of going into a crowd of people at a museum in San Francisco is still scary to me. Not going to do it.

The icing on that cake was an article about Judy and her retrospective that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle. Maybe it was the way the article was written, but it was all "I, Me, Mine" over and over again, rather than about the social messages that Judy's works represent. I suppose the focus on an artist's personality is what a retrospective ends up being about. It just rubbed me the wrong way. I am, though, well aware that artists in any of the performing or visual arts must have a grand ego as they pursue their art all the way to the top. So, the deal was sealed for me, that I would not risk getting Covid-19 to go and review Judy's body of work.

I'm glad I spent those years helping her out, and seeing what the rules and regs were for that real big grown-up art world. The course of these 40 years has shown me a lot about myself, about life, and my true values. Judy is no longer a gold merit pin on my art lapel, but she is an interesting chapter in my life's unfolding path. Thanks always for that, Judy.