Judy Chicago’s Feminist Revelations Alight in London’s Serpentine

The scale and ambition of Judy Chicago’s late 20th century feminist art is well known, from her ceremonial banquet (1974-79) to monumental works associated with (1980-85), like , a 30 foot long drawing in Prismacolor pencil, and , a 14 foot long tapestry. These bold works were some of the very first to center subjects that are an everyday reality for many women, yet had long been rendered invisible by the monotonous creations of a male-dominated art world.

Now, it is time to step behind the scenes and learn about their genesis. “Revelations” at Serpentine North in Kensington Gardens, London, on view through September 1, presents rarely seen drawings and preparatory studies that are shown side-by-side with some of Chicago’s best known works. The creative process is further brought to life through video interviews and audio recordings, including accounts from the original participants from .

Though she has been the subject of several retrospectives across the U.S., amazingly, this is Chicago’s largest ever solo institutional show in London. Artnet News delves into its greatest revelations.

In the gigantic drawing (1982), pulsating lines take on both a bodily and topographical character, foregrounding a formal connection between women’s bodies and the natural world. The work emerged from the accumulation of many experimental drawings. When these works are grouped together, we can see how the very act of drawing is one of endless conceptual exploration, perhaps why she once described it as “like breathing for me.”

The plight of women under patriarchy is alluded to elsewhere in the (1980s), a series of intriguing semi-figurative drawings that seem to throb with energy and remain open to interpretation. More recently, Chicago has been vocal in her call for action to address the climate crisis, and drawings from (2012-18) bring us face-to-face with some of the animals most imminently at threat of dying out, reminding us of the dark reality behind our convenient lifestyles.

Examples from the series (1982-87) subvert tropes of idealized masculinity from Renaissance painting, contorting men’s faces into grotesque caricatures. It is a confronting reminder of the fact that, in some cases, men are a serious threat to women.

“I knew that I didn’t want to keep perpetuating the use of the female body as the repository of so many emotions; it seemed as if everything – love, dread, longing, loathing, desire, and terror – was projected onto the female by both male and female artists,” Chicago has said about the series. “I wondered what feelings the male body might be made to express. Also, I wanted to understand why men acted so violently.”

One hall in the Serpentine North pavilion has been dedicated to Chicago’s “Atmospheres,” a series of site-specific performances produced from 1968-74 that saw the artist experiment with pyrotechnics. She has since recalled how many male land artists “were trying to control the landscape or the experience in space,” whereas her works aimed “to soften or ‘feminize’ the L.A. art scene of the 1960s, which was singularly inhospitable to women.”

Also on view is , created in collaboration with Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot, art and tech platform DMINTI, and Tezos blockchain. Visitors are invited to enter a participatory booth where they can record video responses to 11 questions, contributing to a global archive of answers that are “digitally” threaded together. Prompts like “would both men and women be gentle?” and “would old women be revered?” invite participants to reflect on the nuances of an alternative reality in which femininity is celebrated and powerful rather than repressed and derided.

, a large wall textile featuring a patchwork of previous responses from participants in Mexico, Argentina, the U.S., and France, is also on view.