Institutional Time from Fresno to Today: Judy Chicago’s Career Through Art Education

Education has been fundamental to the artwork of Judy Chicago since she came to feminism in the late 1960s. Chicago developed a feminist art course while teaching at California State University-Fresno in 1970, founded the first Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts with Miriam Schapiro in 1971 (where she collaborated with student-artists on the Womanhouse installation), returned to academia later in her career in the 1990s, and sponsored the founding of the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection at Pennsylvania State University, a living archive on feminist art education. Not only have her academic experiences played a direct role in her career as an artist, but her practice as an artist has been inspired by a strong intention to educate the viewers of her work, most clearly evidenced in The Dinner Party (1975-79). As she writes in Institutional Time: A Critique of Studio Art Education (2014, The Monacelli Press), “Increasingly, understandable content in art has come to be seen almost like an infectious disease, something to be avoided...in my opinion, not only is content important, it should be expressed clearly so that it can be understood by viewers.” This presentation explores this lesser recognized alternative career path Chicago has taken as an artist educator, and asks how her teaching, directly and through her work, has played a seminal role.