Judy Chicago
American (Chicago, Illinois, 1939)Rejection Quintet
With Rejection Quintet Chicago found her distinctive voice as an artist — an alternative to what she saw as the cold, male-dominated formal qualities of Minimalism, the art movement that was prominent at the time. She called the five works in the quintet "central-core imagery" because they depicted her view of what it was like "to be organized around a central core, my vagina, that which made me a woman." Even as these breakthrough drawings embraced female sensuality, however, their accompanying texts reflected the rejection she expected to feel when they were unveiled to the art world.
In Chicago Rejection Drawing, for example, the handwritten text says that rejection feels "like having your flower split open." This statement offers an explanation of what is transpiring in the accompanying images. Chicago chose this approach to her work as part of an effort to reach diverse audiences, especially those outside the art world. "I had an audience with the advent of the women's movement that wanted to see women-centered images," Chicago has explained, "but they didn't have the tools to understand art. Then I had the art world audience, who knew nothing about a female sensibility. I had to educate them, too. So I wrote on the drawings, to try and educate my audience."
Keywords
flowers, grids, sexuality, feminism
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