Artist's Reception: Friday, June 18, 2010, 5:30 - 7:30pm
LewAllen Galleries is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Judy Chicago: The Toby Heads, on view from June 18 – July 25, 2010, at the gallery’s Railyard venue. Judy Chicago is among the world’s most celebrated contemporary artists, internationally recognized for the convention-shattering content of her art in such series as The Dinner Party, Birth Project, Powerplay, the Holocaust Project, and Resolutions: A Stitch in Time. As an artist, author, feminist, educator and intellectual whose career now spans more than four decades, she has been a leader and model for an artist’s right to express freely his or her core identity, for a definition of fine art that encompasses craft techniques, and for the necessity of an art that seeks to effect social change.
Chicago’s fluency with an usually broad array of media and her commitment to creating content-based works in the service of cultural transformation have led to her being acknowledged—most recently in Janson’s Basic History of Western Art—not only as a founder of the Feminist art movement but also as a forerunner of Post-Modernism. Further extending the technical and conceptual range of her extraordinary visual repertoire, her latest series, The Toby Heads, includes portrait busts of Toby Shor, a model who has inspired that which the artist expresses as “a meditation upon vulnerability, mortality, and the power of the human spirit.”
As excerpted from the catalogue essay for this exhibition, art historian and curator Laura Addison writes, “One of the hallmarks of Judy Chicago’s artistic practice is her use of particular materials and mastery of specific techniques for their symbolic import—to underscore that symbolism, critique it, or usurp it.” Embracing and elevating the corporeal analogies and communicative abilities of media often associated with “women’s work” in the “high art” hierarchy, The Toby Heads alludes to the simultaneous strength and fragility of glass, extols the sustaining femininity of china-painted porcelain vessels, and re-examines the masculine associations of bronze.
In addition to generating “a perceived window into the thoughts and emotions of Toby,” Addison explicates that “Toby is a stand-in for all of humanity, the vessel that contains all of our notions of what it means to be human.” In all, The Toby Heads embodies the fullest expression to date of Judy Chicago’s simultaneously empowered and compassionate humanism.
Chicago is the recipient of numerous grants, awards, and honorary degrees. Her work has been the subject of significant exhibitions internationally and is included within the distinguished collections of institutions including the British Museum; the Brooklyn Museum; the Getty Trust; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the New Mexico Museum of Art; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the National Gallery; the National Museum of Women in the Arts; and, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The New Yorker Article
