Judy Chicago & Avant Arte

Judy Chicago has changed the game for women in art. We’re honoured to have collaborated on this edition of two pivotal works from her early feminist era: Heaven is For White Men Only & Let It All Hang Out, both originally painted in 1973.

To mark our collaboration, Judy talked us through the formative moments of her career and what made her the feminist icon she is today - from painting cars to sexual awakenings.

Artistic Revelations

When I got out of graduate school at UCLA, I enrolled in auto body school in order to learn to spray paint. It's important to understand the context of the LA art scene at that time, which was very male-centred, and there was also a lot of interest in car culture, which I knew nothing about. 

As to being the only woman in the auto body school, that was the state of things then. I was the only woman in a lot of situations. I was the only woman who wanted to become part of art history, who wanted to be part of the LA art scene. And apparently, I was also the only woman who had a sex drive because the idea at that time was that only men needed to have orgasms, which left cis men completely off the hook because they didn't have to satisfy their female partners.

Auto body school was a revelation for me. I learned probably more there than I did in graduate school. What I learned at auto body school, number one, was making art was about making objects. I had an incredible teacher, a show car painter, and he once said to me: "Judy, there's no such thing as perfection. There's only the illusion of perfection. And I'm gonna show you how to achieve it," which is something I strive for throughout my career: to make images whose simplicity belied their complexity.

Her Feminist Awakening

The early '70s in LA was a heady time. There was not only the women's movement but also the Black Panther movement, the Chicano movement, and the beginnings of the gay and lesbian movement. Change was in the air. Up until that point, it had been impossible to talk about the challenges I had faced in my first decade of professional practice as a woman. But I began to read some of the women's liberation literature coming out of the East Coast, where women were breaking the silence and talking about what they were experiencing. I decided if they could do it, I could do it. But it was still exceedingly dangerous.

To begin to talk about my experiences as a woman artist was number one very, very risky. But I’d had it with trying to be a guy, and I wanted to be myself in my work and in my life. And that is why I left LA for a year and a half and went to Fresno, California, which is in the centre of LA and was psychically very far away from the art scene. So, I could think about how to create a feminist practice that is an openly woman-centred art-making practice. I decided that one path to doing that would be to establish a program to teach young women how to be themselves as artists without having to do what I had to do – which was to disguise my gender.

Colour as Expression

In terms of colour, when I was young, everybody hated my colour because it was pinks and lavenders and purples and oranges, which was completely anti the prevailing minimalist aesthetic, and also the aesthetic of UCLA, which tended towards the browns and the olives. But my colour was completely different. At the end of the '60s, I began to explore the emotive potential of colour, and I began to look at the way different colours can evoke different feelings.

Curiously, many decades later, when I was working on the book about Frida Kahlo I did with the British art historian Francis Borzello, I discovered a page in her diary. It's the only thing I've ever seen that was akin to my own colour study set that equated particular colours with particular emotions.

Heaven is for White Men Only

Heaven is for White Men Only challenges the idea that us '70s white feminists did not see gender in an intersectional way. Heaven is for White Men Only is a painting that consists of multiple colour flesh bars, each of which is a different colour, referencing a range of races and ethnicities. And those bars are configured in such a way that the beautiful blue sky behind it is inaccessible to anybody but white men, which was my understanding at the time then and is certainly my understanding now when the manosphere is taking over the world again.

Let It All Hang Out

In the 1970s, there was this quaint idea that sexual desire was male, that women did not need to have orgasms, and that women did not have a strong sexual drive. But that completely belied my own experience. I began to explore my desire as a woman, and actually, when I painted Let It All Hang Out, it scared me to death because it is about the power of female sexuality and the pulsing nature of female orgasm. I love that painting.

Prophetically ahead of their time, Heaven is For White Men Only & Let It All Hang Out remain as daringly poignant today as when they first created nearly half a century ago. Sign up to collect this piece of history, launching on 28 May below.