The Flowering: The Autobiography of Judy Chicago

by Judy Chicago, Gloria Steinem (Foreword by)

Overview

In this provocative and resonant autobiography—now available in paperback—world-renowned artist and feminist icon Judy Chicago reflects on her extraordinary life and career.

Judy Chicago is America’s most dynamic living artist. Her works comprise a dizzying array of media from performance and installation to the glittering table laid for thirty-nine iconic women in The Dinner Party (now permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum), the groundbreaking Birth Project, and the meticulously researched Holocaust Project. She designed the monumental installation for Dior’s 2020 Paris couture show and, in 2019, established the Judy Chicago Portal, which will help to accomplish her lifelong goal of overcoming the erasure of women’s achievements.

The Flowering is her vivid and revealing autobiography, fully illustrated with photographs of her work, as well as never-before- published personal images and a foreword by Gloria Steinem. Chicago has revised and updated her classic first autobiography with previously untold stories, fresh insights, and an extensive afterword covering the last twenty years. This powerful narrative weaves together the stories behind someof Chicago’s most significant artworks and her journey as a woman artist with the chronicles of her personal relationships and her understanding, from decades of experience and extensive research, of how misogyny, racism, and other prejudices intersect to erase the legacies of artistswho are not white and male while dismissing the suffering of millions of creatures who share the planet.

The Flowering is an essential read for anyone interested in making change, now available in paperback.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780500297315
Publisher:	Thames & Hudson
Publication date:	06/27/2023
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	421,660
Product dimensions:	6.60(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Judy Chicago is an artist, author, feminist, and educator whose career spans nearly six decades. Her work has been the subject of major retrospectives at Serpentine (2024), the New Museum (2023), and the de Young Museum (2021), and is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the British Museum; the de Young Museum; the Getty Trust; the Hammer Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Moderna Museet; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Tate; and more than twenty-five university art museums.


Gloria Steinem is an American feminist and social political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader and spokeswoman for the American feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Editorial Reviews

"A meticulous record of the artist's life and career… [Judy Chicago's] writing moves fluidly between accounts of her personal life, her artistic endeavors and struggles, and the evolution of her feminism into a feminist art practice."

National Museum of Women in the Arts

"The story of [Judy Chicago's] life…promises to be a rollicking tale."

Artnews

"Chicago's new auto­bi­ogra­phy, The Flowering, doc­u­ments both the his­tori­cal and con­tem­porary pre­carity of her work while also reminding readers of her visceral, artis­tic vision... It is fit­ting for Chica­go to have such a rich­ly illus­trat­ed auto­bi­ogra­phy. Equal­ly daz­zling is Chicago's story of her strug­gles to cre­ate the work, to have it seen, and to be respect­ed in the art world... A grip­ping read."

Jewish Book Council

"Combining engrossing, urgent storytelling with illustrations, personal images and a foreword by Gloria Steinem, Chicago relays the story of an artist determined to ensure that women's cultural achievements are permanently valued."

Time

"When one reads the narrative of [Judy Chicago's] life, one sees how tough a struggle she has had to reach the situation of respect she now enjoys."

Artlyst - Edward Lucie-Smith

"Combining engrossing, urgent storytelling with illustrations, personal images and a foreword by Gloria Steinem, Chicago relays the story of an artist determined to ensure that women's cultural achievements are permanently valued."

Time

"This inspiring read tells the story of one of our most influential contemporary artists: a woman who was able to break the barrier of a male-dominated, chauvinistic system by revealing to the world what feminine creativity can produce. The imperative now lies in transforming this message into a reality for tomorrow."

Maria Grazia Chiuri

"Chicago, now in her triumphant eighties, charts the evolution of her radical, conceptually and technically complicated art... Her dramatic life and extensive and intrepid body of work deserve close attention."

Booklist

"Exhilarating… Artist Judy Chicago's welcome new memoir, her first since 1996's Beyond the Flower, updates readers on her adventures in the intervening quarter century."

Shelf Awareness (starred review)

"Judy Chicago's The Flowering is the update to her autobiographical writings we urgently need. It recasts Judy's pioneering sensibility for the important debates of our times, ensuring her pivotal place in the discourse of feminism and art."

Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries Hans Ulrich Obrist

"Now, we need Judy Chicago more than ever."

Gloria Steinem

"Intimate and absorbing... hard to put down... This personal story traces the artist's career and highlights her determination to champion women."

Moment

"A page turner for creative readers passionate about change."

Surface

"To read The Flowering is to take a riveting masterclass in creativity, bravery, and never giving up.  Like an addictive page-turner, I found myself reading it into the early morning hours—enlightened, infuriated, and electrifyingly inspired. "

New York Times bestselling author of Crazy Rich As Kevin Kwan

"Judy Chicago is one of the world’s greatest living artists. The stories she tells in The Flowering are integral to the post-war history of art, gender relations and Jewish diaspora culture. Chicago's clear, direct voice makes her aesthetic and political positions easily accessible—a feat that reveals her ability to engage and her effort to empower us all."

Dr. Sarah Thornton

"An intimate [and] revealing account of an artist of grit and gumption who set the pattern for much of the art being made today."

The Washington Post

"An intimate tour of [Judy Chicago's] development as an artist, sharing the challenges, struggles, and triumphs to make space for women in the male dominated art world, which established false hierarchies that continue to this day. Refusing to play along, Chicago subverted the system from within, using her work to call out established notions of art, history, and gender, restoring the Divine Feminine to its rightful place in the pantheon."

Dazed

"In The Flowering, Judy Chicago offers a clear-eyed, unapologetic accounting of ambition and a life dedicated to making and supporting feminist art. From her childhood until the present, The Flowering is not only the story of a life fully lived or a woman committed, first and foremost to her art, it is also a compelling history of contemporary feminist art in the United States. Judy Chicago has a distinct point of view, in her art and in her words. The Flowering offers the opportunity to inhabit that perspective, and understand how a woman artist forged a path not only for herself but so many others. This book is fascinating and I couldn't put it down."

author of Hunger and How to be Heard Roxane Gay

2021-05-21
A new autobiographical work from the renowned American feminist artist.

Chicago (b. 1939) explores her life and career from the perspective of a female artist in a male-dominated art world. In addition to countless personal and professional details, this book also includes vivid full-color photographs of her work and a foreword by Gloria Steinem, who writes that Chicago “spent her life not only inventing Feminist Art, but inventing a feminist way of creating art.” The author opens with details of her early childhood, attributing her strong sense of self to her father’s encouragement and interactions with her. Initially, Chicago’s matter-of-fact tone and self-praising comments make her words feel cold. However, as she begins discussing her time spent teaching the Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College, aimed to empower future female artists, her tone warms, and her passionate personality emerges. Like many women artists, Chicago’s experiences have taught her that she has to fight marginalization in the art world. As she chronicles her rise in an arena controlled by men, she also explores the genesis of the works that stemmed from those experiences. The author shows how her art was often received poorly, seemingly due to her depictions of the female experience and form in a graphic manner. She explains many of her major works, including The Dinner Party, the Birth Project, and the Holocaust Project, the challenges she faced during the creation of each, and the reception each received. Fortunately, as Chicago notes, the public perception of her work has shifted with time; she was recently named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. Additionally, works of hers that were once criticized or dismissed are finding new and receptive audiences. Overall, Chicago’s narrative speaks to the power of persistence and remaining true to yourself, especially important in the art world.

An unapologetic examination of the life of an artist dedicated to following her passions.

Kirkus Reviews