When Judy Chicago had her picture taken wearing boxing gloves in a Los Angeles boxing ring in 1971, she was spoofing a trend among her male peers in the art scene: promoting their shows using macho imagery. Little did Chicago know then that decades of fighting (against critical drubbings, against insolvency, against the blues) lay ahead of her--a theme in the exhilarating The Flowering: The Autobiography of Judy Chicago.
Born Judy Cohen in Chicago in 1939, the artist studied at UCLA at a time when a male critic had no compunction about saying to her, "You know, Judy, you have to decide whether you're going to be a woman or an artist." When the naturally tenacious Chicago collided with the incipient women's movement, it galvanized her to make art without apologizing for either her ambition or the feminist content of her work. The most famous example: The Dinner Party, a career-making installation featuring vulval imagery alongside the names of accomplished women from history.
The Flowering covers the same ground as Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist, Chicago's 1996 memoir, and updates readers on what she's been up to in the intervening quarter century, much of it represented in the book's reproductions. The Flowering also includes an account of how The Dinner Party found its permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum early in the new century, which corresponded with a critical reassessment of and appreciation for Chicago's work--but happily, no diminishment in her fighting spirit. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer