Marking both her 75th birthday and three decades of living and working in New Mexico, “Local Color: Judy Chicago in New Mexico 1984-2014” is on view at the New Mexico Museum of Art through October 12, 2014. This show is among the first to spotlight recent works by artist Chicago and will focus on both large-scale public projects and smaller scale personal artworks.
Based in Belen, New Mexico, where she and her husband renovated the old Belen Hotel, Chicago has said, “Until we moved into the Belen Hotel, I never owned any property as I didn’t want the responsibility – what I wanted was the freedom to work. And that’s what New Mexico has given me, far away from the centers of the art world (i.e., New York and LA) where the international art market presses down on artists and makes it difficult to pursue a personal vision like my own.”
Chicago gained broad public attention in the late 1970s for her monumental feminist installation, “The Dinner Party”, now permanently installed as part of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. While her early works gave voice to women’s experience in western art and history, these later works broaden the discourse to propose a moral and thoughtful existence – one empathetic towards other humans, other species and the planet as a whole.
Never one to pull back from controversial discussion, this exhibit continues its focus on artworks both large in theme and those more personal in use and content. Her works addresses the complexity of gender, injustice, inequality, the atrocities of war and the environmental costs of nuclear dependence. Drawn from the artist’s studio, the New Mexico Museum of Art collection and private collectors, ‘Local Color’ features works from the series: “PowerPlay”, “Holocaust Project”, “Nuclear Waste (d)”, “Resolutions: A Stitch in Time” and “Kitty City.”
In addition, the installation will not only highlight the broad range of topics the artist has addressed in her work, but also the broad range of media she has worked in with the inclusion of cast bronze, needlework, stained and painted glass, works on paper and painted porcelain.
And like many artists before her, Judy Chicago has made New Mexico her home, who will have lived and worked in New Mexico for three decades when this exhibit opens; a much longer stay for the artist than in her birthplace of Chicago, which inspired the last name she gave herself.
For more information, contact Steve Cantrell at 505.476.1144 or steve.cantrell@state.nm.us.