Judy Chicago: Jewish Identity

Judy Chicago: Jewish Identity

Published in conjunction with the exhibition
Judy Chicago: Jewish Identity

Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum
February 8 – July 6, 2007

Jean Bloch Rosensaft, Director
Laura Kruger, Curator
Judy Becker, Margot Berman, Bernice Boltax, and Karen Palmer, Curatorial Assistants
Rachel Litcofsky, Museum Coordinator
Leah Kaplan, Public Programs Coordinator

Design: Tabak Design
Photography: Donald Woodman

Judy Chicago: Jewish Identity
© Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

ISBN 1-884300-13-8

Front Cover: The Creation, Birth Project, 1985. Serigraphy, 32 ¼” x 42 ¼”.
Photo © Donald Woodman. Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM.
Back Cover: Rainbow Shabbat, Holocaust Project, 1992. Stained glass, 4’6” x 16’.
Fabricated by Bob Gomez, Hand Painted by Dorothy Maddy, Designed by Judy
Chicago. Photo © Donald Woodman. Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM.
Title Page: The Female Face of Pesach, studies for matzoh cover, 1999. Watercolor, watercolor
pencil on rag paper, 10” x 10” each. Photo © Donald Woodman. Collection: Artist.

JUDY CHICAGO: Jewish Identity

Edited and Foreword by Jean Bloch Rosensaft
Essays by Laura Kruger and Gail Levin

HEBREW UNION COLLEGE-JEWISH INSTITUTE OF RELIGION MUSEUM
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, New York

Foreword

The Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum is honored to present this retrospective exhibition of the works of Judy Chicago, illuminating the impact of her Eastern European roots and Jewish cultural and political activist upbringing on the development of her identity, values, and creativity. Organized to coincide with the permanent installation of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, this exhibition explores the biographical and personal sources for Chicago’s oeuvre and features leading works from private and public collections that document the evolution of her Jewish themes. The art and archival artifacts on display reveal how the artist’s secular Jewish upbringing was deeply imbued with Jewish ethical values, particularly the concept of tikkun (the healing of the world) and the aspiration for social justice in our society.

Tracing her ancestry to the Vilna Gaon in 18th century Lithuania, Chicago’s artistic lineage goes back to her great grandfather, a rabbi and Talmudic scholar in Minsk, who carved the priestly blessing hands for his synagogue’s Torah Ark. Her mother’s immersion in Jewish secular culture encouraged Chicago’s development as an artist. Chicago’s feminist advocacy is linked to the influence of her first-generation American father, a labor organizer and educator, who inspired her commitment to civil and human rights. Furthermore, her self-liberating change of name to Judy Chicago (née Judy Cohen, married to Gerowitz) to divest “all names imposed upon her through male social dominance” reflects the city-based surnames that Jews adopted after their Emancipation in 19th-century Europe.

Chicago’s mission to challenge gender stereotypes and raise awareness of the ways in which women’s creativity has been erased, marginalized, or suppressed has spurred her engagement as a pioneer of the Women’s Movement. Her exploration of traditional women’s crafts harks back to earlier generations of Jewish women’s handwork for Torah ark curtains, mantles, and wimples, and other embroideries with Hebrew characters and Jewish symbols. Her feminism has animated her depiction of female imagery and informed her experimentation with theater, film, and multi-media installation. An educator as well as an artist, Chicago has written the story of women artists into the art history books that previously omitted any inclusion of their significant contributions to world culture.

The Dinner Party, bringing together 39 great women throughout the ages, has been seen by more than a million viewers in six countries. This monumental work expresses Chicago’s notion of the Passover seder, with the recitation of the history of the Exodus and its message of emancipation at the core of her chronicle of women’s history. The names of Jewish women of achievement that appear in the documentation sections of The Dinner Party – Judith, Abigail, Beruriah, Deborah, Esther, Hulda, Miriam, Zipporah, Athaliah, Jezebel, Lilith, Maacah, Leah, Naomi, Rachel, Rebekah, Ruth, Sarah, Gracia Mendeza, Emmy Noether, Rachel Katznelson, Gertrude Stein, Golda Meir, Henrietta Szold, Ida Kaminska, Nelly Sachs, Rachel Vernhagen, Hannah Senesh, and Hannah Arendt – make manifest the continuum of Jewish women’s experience, from biblical antiquity to modernity, transcending time and space.

The quest for human freedom and tolerance is central to Chicago’s eight-year-long collaboration with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, on the Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light. Chicago’s emotional identification with the Nazi destruction of European Jewry demonstrates the vital role that contemporary artists can play in transmitting Holocaust memory and fostering universal human understanding.

We are pleased to mount this exhibition as part of The Feminist Art Project, a national consortium of cultural institutions joining together in 2007 to promote greater awareness of women’s cultural production and the international impact of feminist art. It is most fitting that Judy Chicago’s identity and creativity are being presented in the museum of the seminary that ordained the first women rabbis in America and Israel. The College-Institute is committed to advancing egalitarian rights in Jewish life, practice, and leadership, and takes pride in the largest women’s Judaic studies faculty outside of Israel. It is our hope that Judy Chicago’s artistic message will continue to inspire and enlighten visitors of all faiths for the benefit of humankind.

Jean Bloch Rosensaft
Director
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum

Judy Chicago: An Agent of Change

If Judy Chicago didn’t exist, someone would have had to invent her! This sentiment is voiced by the legion of people whose lives have been impacted by Judy Chicago and her art. Chicago, a genuine force of nature, combines qualities of intelligence, compassion, exasperation, impatience, and proselytizing zeal. Her initial outrage, upon realizing that women had been systematically ignored, deleted, marginalized, forgotten, demeaned, manipulated, and blotted out of history, is a continuing theme in all of her work. Highly energized, unafraid of controversy, and sharply articulate, she set out to change things and change them she did.
In her recent book, Becoming Judy Chicago: A Biography of the Artist, Dr. Gail Levin examines the interweaving of Chicago’s personal and artistic sensibilities with her Jewish background and values. This intensely researched volume follows every thread of the artist’s maturation and creative development, tying together her manifold interests, passions, and successes. She is in equal part an artist, author, feminist, educator, and intellectual, and Dr. Levin addresses each of these aspects, tracing their interaction to the visual whole.

As a social activist, Chicago clearly saw the inequities of racism and political slander. During her college years at UCLA in the late 1950s, she created posters for NAACP rallies and programs and understood that race discrimination and gender discrimination stemmed from the same source: ignorance. However, it is an unbalanced view to see Judy Chicago solely as a social activist, since much of her work emerges from the need to address deeper historical inequities. First and foremost, it is through her art that she has effected social change. Coming of age as a feminist during the
sexual revolution, her highly charged art caught public attention. Frequently derided by critics for the shocking subject matter and easy compartments of art criticism, Chicago nonetheless became the visual leader for people awakening to the self-imposed constraints of their lives. Challenging the ‘male gaze’ of the art world, in which the norm was men look- ing at women, she promulgated the idea of women taking pride in their own sexuality.

In 1979, with the introduction of The Dinner Party, the central theme of which extols the physical, female source of creativity, Chicago started an earthquake. Prior to this work, although nude women were the norm in both painting and sculpture, there was no sense of organic physicality in the art world. Women were sculpted in pure, unblemished white marble, chaste, virginal, smoothly groomed, and used as objects of suppressed (male) desire or symbols of unachievable purity. Chicago brought the reality of tangible, lush, pulsing women’s bodies into the art world. The very fact that all of humankind, male and female, emerged from a female vagina, had seemingly not occurred to most of the art-viewing public. Long accustomed to admiring bare breasts, audiences were shaken to the core by the flowering of vaginal sculpture.

Chicago had chosen to depict each of the celebrated women invited to her dinner party by using the very materials and techniques previously relegated as ‘women’s arts’ by the male art world; the domestic creativity of needlework, embroidery, ceramics and painted dinnerware. Her epic works, which she called ‘Projects,’ all make use of these techniques. They are multi-image, collaborative works, created over a period of time and by numerous volunteer artists working to achieve Chicago’s vision of extending a single concept. Incorporating many forms of needlework they thus secure their appellation as ‘feminist’ or ‘women’s art.’

Following The Dinner Party in power and impact was the Birth Project (1980-1985). There are very few visual or sculptural images in the western canon of art depicting childbirth. Christianity hedges the subject by presenting the virgin birth as an off-stage birthing. The golden rays of eye contact emanating from the Angel of Annunciation to the Virgin are followed by the beautiful swelling of her womb and then, the scene in the manger. The act of childbirth is thus mystified and traditionally absent from western art. However, all tribal cultures graphically depict the action of birth and it is this reality that Chicago incorporates in her seminal Birth Project. This complex exhibition consisted of 80 units fabricated by 130 women artisans from the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. Heavily researched, as are all of Chicago’s extended presentations, the Birth Project relied on personal interviews and the frank memories of women’s emotional and physical experiences. Chicago positioned birth as the central moment of human survival and acknowledged the great burden of sacrifice imposed on women. The painful efforts of women achieving birth are paralleled by the volcanic upheavals of the planet itself. The cosmic bond of woman as earth mother, an underlying theme of tribal lore, is literally woven into the theme of this unique undertaking. It is not surprising that women were not prime players on the world stage throughout most of history since they were pregnant, giving birth, recovering from that event, nursing babies, caring for their young ones, and endlessly repeating this cycle.

The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light was presented in 1993 after eight years of extensive interviews, travel to Holocaust sites, and historical research. Not only is it a questioning visual essay on inhumanity, but it also positions the Holocaust as a metaphor for the collapse of civilization. Chicago and her husband, the photographer Donald Woodman, depicted the powerlessness of the victims that extended beyond their destroyed communities, culture, religion, property, and physical lives. By linking the specific annihilation of European Jews by the Nazis to the continuing world abuses of genocide, slavery, homophobia, and environmental destruction, the Holocaust Project extends the Holocaust atrocities to a scale of global chaos.

In 1970 at Fresno State College in California, Judy Chicago founded the first feminist art education program. A year later, with Miriam Shapiro, she created a second program at the California Institute of the Arts. These efforts to build a supportive community of women artists focusing on women’s issues culminated in 1973 with the first independent school for women artists, The Feminist Studio Workshop. The FSW, co-founded by Chicago, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, and the late art historian Arlene Raven, was based on the concept that a feminist agenda should be the basis of this art educational facility. The pressing issues of gender choice, violence against women, incest awareness, affirmative action, and support of women of diverse ethnic backgrounds were addressed by the women artists in a nurturing community. Chicago continues her commitment to sharing experiences through teaching both as an artist in residence and, together with Donald Woodman, as director for interdisciplinary site projects.

Judy Chicago found her voice in the battle for self-determination, freedom of reproductive rights, and economic, social and legal equality. Her empowering art and unrelenting stance for equality of every opportunity have made Judy Chicago a household word.

Laura Kruger
Curator
Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion Museum

Judy Chicago: Jewish Identity

This exhibition features the art of Judy Chicago, who was born Judith Sylvia Cohen on July 20, 1939. She was the first child of May Levinson and Arthur M. Cohen,
a couple that typified the secular idealism of a generation that struggled to forge a new brand of Jewish identity, militant not only against injustice in American society, but often against the religious strictures of immigrant parents who themselves had fled Czarist anti-Semitism. Judy’s mother was the eldest daughter who sacrificed her own artistic development to help support younger siblings and her father was a rabbi’s independent-minded youngest son pampered by older sisters – both reared by energetic mothers who sustained households when husbands proved less able to cope with the new world. Both of her parents grew up in households in- fused by Yiddish, which her paternal grandmother continued to speak, calling her by her Yiddish name, Yudit Sipke. As a result, Yiddish idiomatic expressions and phrases enlivened Judy’s and the rest of the family’s English-language speech.

Arthur Cohen’s pride in descent from the “blue blood” of the Vilna Gaon strongly impressed his daughter: “Totally devoted to my father, I believed him and was mortified when I bled common red when I first cut myself.” Known as the Gaon or “Eminence” of Vilna, Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720-1797) helped shape modern Jewish history. Learned in the Torah and Talmud, the Gaon gained renown both for emending the ancient texts – correcting scribal errors – and for vigorous teaching that dealt also with grammar and such secular subjects as science and mathematics, although virtually no secularizing influence had yet touched Eastern European Jewry. At a time when many women received no formal education, the Gaon, five of whose eight children were daughters, urged that fathers “train” their daughters, who should read “moral books,” especially on the Sabbath.

Although Chicago’s home did not practice Jewish ritual, “it becomes obvious that I was raised in a household shaped by what might be called Jewish ethical values,” she writes, “particularly the concept of tikkun, the healing or repairing of the world.” Her paternal grandfather, Benjamin Cohen, from Slobodka, a shtetl near Kovna, Lithuania, attended the small town’s yeshiva (institution for higher learning in Judaism), which came under the influence of religious reform known as the Musar (ethics) movement, motivated in part by the secular humanistic challenge of the Haskalah or Enlightenment that came to Eastern Europe from Germany in the nineteenth century. Musar reformists urged moral and ethical rejuvenation and emphasized the ethical and homiletic strain of teaching and preaching in Jewish tradition. The Musar’s founder, Israel Lipkin Salanter (1810-1883), stressed humility and taught the precepts of leading a “perfect ethical life, exemplified by compassion for the poor.” Benjamin’s exposure to such altruistic Judaic humanism, which is acknowledged to contain “potentially radical values,” eventually enabled him to pass them on to his children, especially his youngest son Arthur.

When Arthur finished high school at the age of sixteen, 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. At the time of the stock market crash in October 1929, when the overwhelming economic downturn took its toll, radical politics made much more sense than religion to Arthur, who was just twenty years old. It was probably at this moment of economic collapse that Arthur Cohen found the American Communist Party, which had its largest impact during the 1930s, when it organized the unemployed, protested evictions and cuts in relief aid, and led hunger marches. In America, both the Communist Party and its sympathizers grew in numbers. Arthur exchanged one orthodoxy for another – his father’s for Marxism. Arthur may have rejected his father’s religious calling, but not the clear humanitarian goals his father drew from the Musar movement, his desire to make the world a better place.

Jewish religious observance was practiced in Judy’s extended family. She also experienced Jewish culture and ritual through her mostly Jewish classmates at elementary school. Her father’s death, when she was just thirteen, prompted her to turn to the Jewish religion, despite her secular upbringing. She searched for solace at the Anshe Emet Synagogue, a congregation of the Conservative Movement, near her home. She recalls going “on and off to temple in Chicago until I was 16,” for the Yizkor memorial service for the dead. Those reciting Yizkor promise to do “acts of charity and goodness” in the memory of the deceased person and to be faithful to their teachings. Although the synagogue’s attempt to raise donations eventually alienated this teenager in mourning, who had no funds to offer, she nonetheless absorbed the lesson of the prayer, taking to heart the humanitarian goals of her father’s prematurely abridged life, which continued to inform her own.

While still in high school, Judy began dating a rabbinical student with whom she would remain in touch for many years, though she quickly realized that she was not cut out to be a rabbi’s wife. Judy attended and graduated from U.C.L.A. In her letters home to her mother, she frequently used Yiddish words in transliteration, a habit
of speech that was second nature to her. This unselfconscious use of Yiddish with her mother also suggests comfort with, even pride in, their shared Eastern Euro-pean Jewish heritage. Following her father’s teachings, during her freshman year at U.C.L.A., Judy became interested in the Civil Rights movement and began to work for the NAACP. She designed posters for
their events and became the corresponding secretary of the Westwood chapter.

That same year Judy met her first love, Leslie Lacy, an African- American student at the University of Southern California. He later recalled her in a “fictionalized” memoir, The Rise and Fall of a Proper Negro, pointing out that he did not then share her radical politics. At the age of twenty-one, she married Jerry Gerowitz, whose Jewish parents had moved to Los Angeles from Chicago. Barely two years later, he died in an auto accident, but she had taken his name during the marriage and continued to be known as Judy Gerowitz after his death in 1963.

Inspired by the feminist movement, Judy went to teach at Fresno State College in early 1970, eager to explore the female experience and to find and study earlier women’s art. That summer, she legally changed her name to Judy Chicago, which, inspired by her accent strongly reminiscent of her native city, her Los Angeles art dealer had dubbed her. She took out an ad in Artforum announcing why she had made this change: “Judy Gerowitz hereby divests herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance and freely chooses her own name: Judy Chicago.”

That fall she began to teach only women in what soon came to be called the Feminist Art Program. Chicago moved her program to the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia the next academic year so that she could run it together with her friend, the painter, Miriam Schapiro. The two led students in producing Womanhouse, an early installation and performance space intended to interrogate the situation of women. The project attracted more than ten thousand visitors and national publicity during February 1972 when it was open.

Chicago left CalArts in 1973 to found the Feminist Studio Workshop with art historian Arlene Raven and graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, both of whom, like Schapiro, shared her working-class Jewish background. To house the workshop, the three founded the Woman’s Building, which opened on November 28, 1973. The next year, Chicago produced and exhibited drawings for a series of lithographs called Compressed Women Who Yearned to Be Butterflies, one of which focuses on Mme. Deronda, who grapples with her genius in George Eliot’s 1876 novel, Daniel Deronda, which features a family of characters called “Cohen.” On her drawing, Chicago transcribed Mme. Deronda’s bitter protest: “You are not a woman. You may try – but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl. To have a pattern cut out – this is the Jewish woman! This is what you must be; this is what you are wanted for; a woman’s heart must be of such size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet.”

In March 1975 Chicago published Through the Flower, a widely read manifesto for feminist art and memoir in which she recalls her childhood and development as an artist, expressing pride in having been reared in the secular Jewish culture that figures importantly in the book. She recounts how, when she was still a small child, her mother’s stories of going “to the Jewish People’s Institute,” where she mingled with “creative people,” became the context through which May Cohen encouraged her young daughter’s love of drawing and nurtured her desire to become an artist.

From 1969 until she divorced in 1979, Chicago was married to Lloyd Hamrol, a fellow Jew, an artist, and a close friend, whom she had known since their undergraduate days. This is the same period during which she conceived and executed her major work, The Dinner Party, with the help of many, mainly volunteers. Inspired by images of the Last Supper, which was, of course, the Passover seder, The Dinner Party features thirty-nine place settings around a triangular table, representing women from myth and history of whom only one is Jewish: Judith of the Hebrew Bible. More Jewish women, however, figure among the 999 names inscribed on the porcelain-tiled Heritage floor, from the biblical matriarchs Rachel and Sarah to Golda Meir and Henrietta Szold in modern times (illustration on page 2). More importantly, Chicago made the plates on the third wing rise up physically “as a symbol of women’s struggle for freedom,” echoing the seder’s theme of the Jews’ passage from slavery to freedom.

During the early 1980s, Chicago worked on the Birth Project, another engagement with volunteers who executed her needlework designs. Included were several different renditions of Creation, which take birth as a metaphor for creation itself. When an interviewer inquired whether the idea of God fit into her life, she responded: “Yes. . . . I believe in God.
I believe that . . . I’m part of this whole, large fabric of life and it’s a miracle and that’s God for me.”

By 1985, when Chicago met and married photographer Donald Woodman, who shared her Eastern European Jewish heritage, she was already exploring her Jewish identity and considering a major project dealing with the Holocaust. Woodman became her collaborator on both the research and the execution of the project, which finished in 1993. In daring to represent imagined scenes from the Holocaust, Chicago and Woodman agree with those, including the Israeli scholar Adi Ophir, who believe that it is necessary to “concretize the horror. Honor its intricate details.” Rather than serve as
a memorial, this approach seeks to educate the public.

In Double Jeopardy, Chicago and Woodman presented the story of the Holocaust as usually recounted, using familiar photographs as illustrations. Chicago then painted what she considered “the untold story of women’s experiences of those same events.” Arbeit Macht Frei/Work Markes Who Free? is an examination of race, class, and oppression in terms of Nazi slave labor and takes up the history of African-American slavery in the United States (illustration on page 10). Chicago’s decision to close the Holocaust Project with the hopeful vision expressed in Rainbow Shabbat is controversial for some, but for others, it stands in opposition to the writer and survivor Primo Levi’s suicide.

Chicago produced Everybody Was Going to See Who She Really Was on October 4, 1993, as part of a suite of drawings she called Autobiography of a Year. In this self-portrait, she depicts herself stripped bare, nude, with a Jewish star visible on her chest, from which she is bleeding, a mark of the emotional anguish she felt at revealing herself. To make absolutely certain that the viewer got her message, she had written the work’s title across her legs and the words “woman” and “Jew” above her right and left arms. The event that prompted this drawing was her anxiety over the impending debut of the Holocaust Project at the Spertus Museum of Judaica in Chicago.

In 1999, in the context of her current marriage, Chicago created Voices from the Song of Songs, a suite of prints to illustrate a new translation from the Hebrew Bible by Marsha Falk, which emphasizes shared pleasure between husband and wife and reflects Jewish tradition, which encourages free expression of a woman’s sexuality to her own husband. Chicago’s Merger Poem about “merging the masculine and feminine” was set to music by Bonia Shur, the director emeritus of liturgical arts at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, and has been included in many prayer books. A feminist vision inspires Chicago and Woodman in their celebration of Passover each spring, when they travel from their home in Belen, New Mexico, to nearby Santa Fe, to join friends at a seder conducted with a Haggadah of her own design.

Following the Jewish mandate to choose life, Resolutions: A Stitch in Time (2000) was Chicago’s attempt to build on the hopeful note in Rainbow Shabbat at the end of the Holocaust Project. Working with women needleworkers, most of whom returned from earlier projects, she designed pieces that emphasized seven themes necessary for human survival: “Family, Responsibility, Conservation, Tolerance, Human Rights, Hope, and Change.” In Chicago’s radical and perhaps utopian image, Bury the Hatchet, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic clergymen literally grasp the handle of a hatchet, metaphorically coming together to end their disagreements. Inspired by the social ideals of her father that have their roots in Jewish teachings, Chicago, in the words of the writer Phyllis Chesler, is “a profoundly Jewish-American artist.”

Dr. Gail Levin, Exhibition Co-Curator and Professor of Art History, American Studies, and Women’s Studies, Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Judy Chicago: Jewish Identity Installation Checklist

1.  Matzoh Cover: Women of Valor/The Female Face of Pesach © Judy Chicago, 1999
   Fabric paint and embroidery on linen, 12” x 36”
   Needlework by Joyce Gilbert
   Collection: Artist and Needleworkers
2. Gilbert Tallit Bag
   © Judy Chicago, 2006
   Fabric paint and embroidery, 11” x 15” Needlepoint by Joyce Gilbert Collection: Joyce Gilbert
3. Bones of Treblinka, Holocaust Project
   © Judy Chicago with Donald Woodman, 1988 Sprayed acrylic, oil and photography on photolinen 48 1⁄2” x 50 1⁄2”
   Photo © Donald Woodman
   Collection: Artists and Through the Flower
4. Banality of Evil/Struthof, Holocaust Project
   © Judy Chicago with Donald Woodman, 1989 Sprayed acrylic, oil and photography on photolinen 30 1⁄4” x 43 1⁄4”
   Photo © Donald Woodman
   Collection: Artists and Through the Flower
5. Four Questions, Holocaust Project
   © Judy Chicago with Donald Woodman, 1993 Sprayed acrylic, oil, Marshall photo oils on photolinen Mounted on aluminum, 42” x 16’6” x 4”
   Photo © Donald Woodman
   Collection: The Artists and Through the Flower
6. Study for The Fall, Holocaust Project
   © Judy Chicago, 1987
   Ink on paper, 23” x 35”
   Photo © Donald Woodman
   Collection: Bob and Audrey Cowan, Santa Monica, CA
7. Vetruvian Man, the Measure?, Holocaust Project
   © Judy Chicago, 1987
   Prismacolor, ink, gouache, and micrography on Arches 32 1⁄2” x 44 1⁄4”
   Photo © Donald Woodman
   Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
8. The Fall, Holocaust Project
   © Judy Chicago, 1993
   Modified Aubusson Tapestry, 4’6” x 18’ Woven by Audrey Cowan
   Photo © Donald Woodman
   Collection: Artist and Audrey Cowan
9. Half-Scale Study for Double Jeopardy, Holocaust Project © Judy Chicago with Donald Woodman, 1990
   Sprayed acrylic, oil, and photography on photolinen
   screen printing and fabric, 24” x 146” x 3”
   Photo © Donald Woodman Collection: Butler Art Institute
10. Sewing Circle III, study for Double Jeopardy, Holocaust Project © Judy Chicago, 1990
    Prismacolor on rag paper, 29 3⁄4” x 22”
    Photo © Donald Woodman
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
11. Behind the Ghetto Wall I, study for Double Jeopardy, Holocaust Project
    © Judy Chicago, 1990
    Prismacolor on rag paper, 29 3⁄4” x 22”
    Photo © Donald Woodman
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
12. Behind the Ghetto Wall II, study for Double Jeopardy, Holocaust Project
    © Judy Chicago, 1990
    Prismacolor on rag paper, 29 3⁄4” x 22”
    Photo © Donald Woodman
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
13. Resistance, study for Double Jeopardy, Holocaust Project © Judy Chicago, 1990
    Prismacolor on rag paper, 29 3⁄4” x 22”
    Photo © Donald Woodman
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
14. Rainbow Shabbat, Holocaust Project
    © Judy Chicago, 1992
    Stained glass, 4’6” x 16’
    Fabricated by Bob Gomez, Hand Painted by Dorothy Maddy Designed by Judy Chicago
    Photo © Donald Woodman
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
15. The Creation, Birth Project
    © Judy Chicago, 1985
    Serigraphy, 32 1⁄4” x 42 1⁄4”
    Photo © Donald Woodman
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
16. Merger Poem
    © Judy Chicago, 1988 Lithograph, 20” x 30” Collection: Through the Flower
17. Creation of the World, Scroll #6, Birth Project © Judy Chicago, 1981-83
    Hand-colored lithograph, 34” x 96”
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
18. Thinking about Being Jewish – Oy Vey © Judy Chicago, 1984
    Prismacolor and graphite on paper 20” x 27 1/8”
    Photo © Donald Woodman Collection: Artist
19. Double Och Un Vai
    © Judy Chicago, 1988
    Wood engraving, 22” x 14 3⁄4”
    Photo © Donald Woodman
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
20. O for Your Scent – Diptych, Voices from the Song of Songs © Judy Chicago, 1999
    Heliorelief, lithograph, and hand-coloring, 40” x 24”
    Photo © Donald Woodman
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
21. Yes, I Am Black and Radiant – Diptych, Voices from the Song of Songs
    © Judy Chicago, 1999
    Heliorelief, lithograph, and hand-coloring, 40” x 24” Photo © Donald Woodman
22. Come Let Us Go Out into the Open Fields – Diptych, Voices from the Song of Songs
    © Judy Chicago, 1999
    Heliorelief, lithograph, and hand-coloring, 40” x 24” Photo © Donald Woodman
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
23. My Dove in the Clefts of the Rock – Diptych, Voices from the Song of Songs
    © Judy Chicago, 1999
    Heliorelief, lithograph, and hand-coloring, 40” x 24” Photo © Donald Woodman
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
24. How Fine You Are, My Love – Diptych, Voices from the Song of Songs
    © Judy Chicago, 1999
    Heliorelief, lithograph, and hand-coloring, 40” x 24” Photo © Donald Woodman
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
25. There You Stand Like a Palm – Diptych, Voices from the Song of Songs
    © Judy Chicago, 1999
    Heliorelief, lithograph, and hand-coloring, 40” x 24” Photo © Donald Woodman
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
26. Stairway to Death, study for Banality of Evil/Struthof, Holocaust Project
    © Judy Chicago, 1989
    Prismacolor and ink on Arches, 22” x 29 3⁄4”
    Photo © Donald Woodman
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
27. Under the Stones of Treblinka – Diptych, Holocaust Project © Judy Chicago with Donald Woodman, 1988
    Sprayed acrylic, oil, and photography on photo linen
    24” x 24”
    Photo © Donald Woodman
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
28. Final Study for Arbeit Macht Frei / Work Makes Who Free?, Holocaust Project
    © Judy Chicago with Donald Woodman, 1992
    Sprayed acrylic, oil, prismacolor, and photography
    on photolinen and rag paper, 32” x 62” Photo © Donald Woodman
    Collection: Elizabeth A. Sackler, New York NY
29. What Would You Have Done? study for Wall of Indifference, Holocaust Project
    © Judy Chicago 1989
    Sprayed acrylic, photo oil and photography on photolinen, 24” x 56 1⁄2”, 32” x 64”
    Photo © Donald Woodman
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
30. Study for Transport – Image 3 (See No Evil/Hear No Evil), Holocaust Project
    © Judy Chicago, 1988
    Prismacolor on paper, 25” x 33”
    Photo © Donald Woodman
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
31. Study for Belsen 2, Holocaust Project
    © Judy Chicago with Donald Woodman, 1987 Mixed media, 12” x 16”
    Photo © Donald Woodman
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
32. Bury the Hatchet, Resolutions: A Stitch in Time
    © Judy Chicago, 2000
    Painting, needlepoint, appliqué & embroidery, 24” x 18” Needlework by Lynda Paterson
    Assisted by Jane Thompson & Mary Ewanoski Photo © Donald Woodman
    Collection: Artist and Needleworkers
33. Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, from Images of Labor © Judy Chicago, 1981
    Prismacolor on rag paper, 29” x 23”
    Collection: Jeffrey and Dorian Bergen
34. Compressed Women Who Yearned to be Butterflies #3: Mme Deronda
    © Judy Chicago, 1974
    Prismacolor on rag paper, 24” x 24”
    Collection: Arkansas Art Cente
35. Judith, place setting from The Dinner Party © Judy Chicago, 1979
    Photograph, 36” x 24”
    Photo © Donald Woodman
36. Everyone Was Going to See Who She Really Was, from Autobiography of A Year
    © Judy Chicago, Oct. 4th, 1993
    Mixed media on Magnani Paper, 15” x 11”
    Photo © Donald Woodman Collection: Artist
37. The Female Face of Pesach, studies for matzoh cover © Judy Chicago, 1999
    Watercolor, watercolor pencil on rag paper, 10” x 10” each Photo © Donald Woodman
    Collection: Artist
38. Four Studies for Rose Family Passover Haggadah, from Judy Chicago sketchbook
    © Judy Chicago, 2005
    Photo © Donald Woodman
    Collection: Artist
39. Judy Chicago Haggadah
    © Judy Chicago, April 5, 2004
    8 1⁄2 x 11
    Compiled and created by the artist
40. Holding Forth in Mea Sharim, from Israel Trip sketchbook © Judy Chicago, 1988
    Ink on paper, 8 1⁄2” x 10 3⁄4”, 160 pages
    Collection: Artist
41. Trying to Reach Back, Trying to Understand Kovna,
    from Russia Trip sketchbook
    © Judy Chicago, 1987
    Ink on paper, 11 1⁄2” x 16”, 74 pages Collection: Artist
42. Trying to Save What Was Left, from sketchbook © Judy Chicago, 1987/88
    Ink on paper, 10 5/8” x 8 1⁄4”
    Collection: Artist
43. Skeletons Trying to Overcome SS, from sketchbook © Judy Chicago, 1987/88
    Ink on paper, 10 5/8” x 8 1⁄4”
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
44. Life Continued But Rivers of Blood Flowed Into the Air, the Water, and the Earth, from sketchbook © Judy Chicago, 1987/88
    Ink on paper, 10 5/8” x 8 1⁄4”
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
45. Not Far from the City There It Was, Majdanek, from sketchbook
    © Judy Chicago, 1987/88
    Ink on paper, 10 5/8” x 8 1⁄4”
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
46. The Ghetto in Flames – Where Deception Gave Way to Force, from sketchbook
    © Judy Chicago, 1987/88
    Ink on paper, 8 1⁄4” x 10 5/8”
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
47. As If Houses and Memorials Could Erase the Crime, from sketchbook
    © Judy Chicago, 1987/88
    Ink on paper, 8 1⁄4” x 10 5/8”
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
48. I Didn’t See It/Do It/Know It, from sketchbook © Judy Chicago, 1987/88
    Ink on paper, 8 1⁄4” x 10 5/8”
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
49. Life Arising/Asserting Itself, study for Belsen, from sketchbook
    © Judy Chicago, 1987/88
    Ink on paper, 10 5/8” x 8 1⁄4”
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
50. Realizing Who She Was, from sketchbook
    © Judy Chicago, 1987/88
    Ink on paper, 8 1⁄4” x 10 5/8”
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
51. Her Father Had Taught Her that It Would Bring a New World, from sketchbook
    © Judy Chicago, 1987
    Ink on paper, 10 5/8” x 8 1⁄4”
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
52. Connecting with Her Heritage in the Prague Cemetery © Judy Chicago, 1992
    Ink on paper, 9” x 12”
    Courtesy: LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
53. Par Aeroflot en Europe, A Map
    Color print, 7 7/8” x 10 3/8”
54. Virtual Tour of The Dinner Party
    Video
    © Donald Woodman
55. Virtual Tour of Holocaust Project: From Darkness Into Light
    Video
    © Donald Woodman

 

HEBREW UNION COLLEGE-JEWISH INSTITUTE OF RELIGION

MUSEUM ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Laura Kruger, Chair
Suzette Acar
Marilyn Alper
Catherine Behrend
Judy Becker
Semmes Brightman
Jocelyn Chait
Phyllis Cohen
Elaine Corwin
Gail Davidson
Barbara Dean
Gloria Dobbs
Cynthia Greener Edelman
Ruth O. Freedlander
Susan K. Freedman
Betty Golomb
Joy G. Greenberg
Barbara Gross
Frances Hess
Ann Holland
Susan Malloy
Nancy Mantell
Claire G. Miller
Anne Murray
Fran Putnoi
Joan Salomon
Richard J. Scheuer
Pierre Schoenheimer
Helene Spring
Livia Straus
Sheila Thau
Mildred Weissman

Founded in 1875, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion is the nation’s oldest institution of higher Jewish education and the academic, spiritual, and professional leadership development center of Reform Judaism. HUC-JIR educates men and women for service to American and world Jewry as rabbis, cantors, educators, and communal service professionals, and offers graduate and post-graduate programs to scholars of all faiths. With centers of learning in Cincinnati, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, and New York, HUC-JIR’s scholarly resources comprise of a renowned library, archive and museum collections, biblical archaeology excavations, research institutes and centers, and academic publications. HUC-JIR invites the community to an array of cultural and educational programs which illuminate Jewish history, identity, and contemporary creativity and which foster interfaith and multiethnic understanding. www.huc.edu

Rabbi David Ellenson, Ph.D.
President

Dr. Alfred Gottschalk
Chancellor Emeritus

Nina Hanan
Chief of Staff

Michael Cheney
Vice President for Finance

Dr. Aaron Panken
Vice President for Strategic Initiatives; Dean, HUC-JIR/New York

Sylvia Posner
Assistant to the President; Administrative Executive to the Board of Governors

Dr. Norman J. Cohen
Provost

Gary Bockelman
Chief Operating Officer

Erica S. Frederick
Vice President for Development

Rabbi Charles A. Kroloff
Vice President for Special Projects

Jean Bloch Rosensaft
Senior National Director for Public Affairs and Institutional Planning; Director, HUC-JIR Museum