Betty Churcher AO Memorial Oration 2025

Judy, it is so fantastic to see you again. I am really delighted to be in conversation with you for the 2025 Betty Churcher AO Memorial Oration. Your iconic minimalist sculpture, Rainbow Pickett, which was originally made in 1965 and remade in 2021, has recently been acquired by the National Gallery of Australia and will soon be on display in the exhibition Know My Name Global, which is opening this April.

It's curated by Deirdre Cannon, Amelia Brown and Vy Tsan. The exhibition presents works of art by living women artists who have pushed the boundary like yourself, with form, with structure, with color, with spatial innovation. From the 1960s to the present day. So I want to start with this work, Rainbow Pickett. This work, with its rainbow hues, was challenging when you made it in 1965.

It was challenging the male dominant minimalist aesthetic at the time. Can you tell us about Rainbow Pickett? How did this particular sculpture come about?

Well, in my early work I started out with very biomorphic work. But it had a certain kind of bright and particularly spectral color, which was greeted by shrieks of horror by my painting instructors at UCLA and then by the burgeoning LA art scene, which I started showing in before I even got out of graduate school. I still remember my painting instructors looking at some of that early work like, which has now become iconic in terms of my car hoods.

And in fact, this is another story that relates to what happened to Rainbow Pickett. I did four car hoods, three of them, Bigamy, Flight and Birth were in my graduate show as paintings and they were greeted with, oh my god, woos and  breasts and your colour is hideous. Well, recently, the drawings for those images were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art.

So, this is a parallel story to what has happened in my career, from horror to art history. I used to refer to Rainbow Pickett as the piece that broke my heart. Because of the reaction to my early biomorphic work, I realised that in order to be taken seriously in the LA art scene of the 60s, which was singularly inhospitable to women, I would have to try to erase any hint of gender from my work.

And so, I began to work in much more minimal form. The good news about this is that because I was focused on color and form, I built sort of the building blocks of my career. But I had a studio with my then boyfriend in Pasadena, a 5000 square foot studio we paid $75 a month total for. Because in those days the art scene was totally different. Anyway, there was a very, very powerful curator named Walter Hopps who ran the Pasadena Art Museum, probably the most powerful curator in Southern California. And there were a lot of artists living in Pasadena because of the cheap rents. And he used to go visit everybody’s studios like once a month. So, I was making these big minimal sculptures, including a piece called Rainbow Pickett, which is spelled with two T's because it's named after Wilson Pickett, a soul singer I listened to a lot during those days.

Anyway, Walter visited the studio after I finished Rainbow Pickett. It was up, and I was actually very proud of it. I thought it was one of the best of my early large scale sculptures, which of course I dreamed that could someday become outdoor pieces. Anyway, Walter refused to look at it.

No.

Literally refused to look at it.

I mean, it just broke my heart. I ran into my bedroom and started crying. Years later, I had breakfast or lunch with him when he was working in Washington at the Corcoran. And I wrote about this in my first book, Through the Flower, although I didn't mention his name. But he apparently had read it and recognised the story because at the restaurant he said to me, I know you hate me. And I'm thinking to myself, you're right.

Although I didn't say that. Anyhow, he said, but you have to understand the 60s in LA. Women were either artists wives or groupies. So, what was I supposed to make of the fact that your work was stronger than most of the men’s? I had to avert my eyes. It was as if I saw a woman pull up her skirt and roll down her stockings.

I had to avert my eyes. So since I was getting that kind of response to all that major sculpture, and I made a lot of it, and I couldn't afford to store it. I ended up destroying a lot of those pieces and there was only one I put away in the storage facility I had in LA that I rented because I thought someday somebody might be interested in seeing some of my early large scale sculptures.

So, before I did that, I was so naive. You know, I was raised in a family of political activists, and my father was completely impervious to the idea of money. In fact, I remember my mother and father used to fight a lot about money because we didn't have very much. And one day I heard them fighting, and my father said to my mother, look around, you see all these records and all these books? That's wealth. And I believed him.

So money was never an issue for me. Selling was never an issue. The market was never an issue. The only thing that was important to me was making art and making a contribution. Okay, so before I destroyed Rainbow Pickett, why I'm telling you that, prefacing what I'm about to say with that, is that you'll understand my complete imperviousness to art expectations, art world expectations.

I had a pretty good dealer. My first dealer was pretty good. He showed some women and he got Rainbow Pickett into what turned out to be the most important, historically important minimalist show called Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum. There were 42 artists. There were only three women. And it apparently attracted a lot of attention, including from Clement Greenberg.

But nobody told me that. Also, nobody told me that when you are in a big New York show, you get on the airplane and you go to the opening. So, I had no idea any of this happened. And I destroyed Rainbow Pickett.

Do you know what the reception for that work at Primary Structures was?

Well, apparently, all I know, I mean, there was some discomfort with the colour by the minimalist guys, and they felt it was too emotive, which has been an ongoing theme in my interactions with the patriarchal art scene.

One consistent feature of my career, which is why I had to create my own career. I mean, I hung out with LA guys, and I was probably the only woman artist who was taken seriously by them. Although it was very peripheral and later on, until Pacific Standard Time to The Getty funded initiative in 2010, 11 and 12 which documented and celebrated Southern California art from 1950s to 1980s, when I was there, I had been sort of systematically erased from the LA art scene, which is, of course, what we know happens to women even when they make an impact. Okay, so I'm watching the guys. They'd be in a big show, and then either the work would sell or a big gallery would come and pick them up, or they get more opportunities.

That never happened to me, no matter what kind of impact or success I had. Nothing happened. And I mean, it was most prominently displayed when The Dinner Party was premiered. And, you know, 100,000 people saw it in San Francisco. They made so much money they bought a computerised cash register for the bookstore they called Judy. And you know, then it became the piece that everybody wanted to see and nobody wanted to show.

And people all over the world organised to bring the piece around the world to a million viewers. Okay, great. Right? I lost everything. I lost my studio, my staff, my marriage. I was in debt. I was basically punished. And that has happened series after series. Nothing would happen and I'd have to start all over again. But because I had such a burning desire to make art, I didn’t care as long as I could be in my studio.

In fact, one time when I was working on The Dinner Party, there was a very prominent collector, because a lot of people were coming, and there was a lot of buzz about The Dinner Party studio and a lot of people were coming to see the studio and the work in progress. And I was working, because it was so hard to get The Dinner Party plates, the dimensional ones through the kiln.

And we used to have to do multiple ones and hope to God one came out. In 2001, there was a show at LA MOCA called A Minimal Future that was curated by Ann Goldstein, who's now at the Chicago Art Institute. But quite by chance, Donald and I were teaching in Southern California because Ann wanted to recreate Rainbow Pickett for her show.

And since we were in Southern California it meant I could advise on the construction of it and the colour in particular. So it was remade then and it began to be shown. I think it was in my show at ICA, the first survey show, I think that was 2018. And then I started working with Jeffrey Deitch and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn at Salon 94, and they asked me if I had ever thought about making some of those early minimal pieces in metal and for outdoors. And as I told you before, yeah, I dreamed of it in the 60s, but it was totally out of the realm of possibility. I had no dealers who would invest in my work. So I was very excited about the prospect of doing small editions of that early work. Of Rainbow Pickett, Trinity, Zig Zag, Sunset Squares.

I mean, it's been just great bringing them back to life.

And in steel.

Yes, and in steel. Right. They won't be so easy to destroy.

Well, exactly and now it's in Australia, so there's no going back. It's amazing.

I know, I told you Rainbow Pickett started out as the piece that broke my heart and had a really happy ending.

Like those drawings for the car hoods that started out being despised and are now in the collection of Museum of Modern Art. You know, collaboration is a hidden aspect of a lot of art production, more openly in print shops. But how many artists have teams of 100 or 150 who are actually making their art? I committed a sin with The Dinner Party, which was I named my collaborators, and that had never been done by anybody else.

In fact, when I lectured in New Zealand, I was showing Birth  Project work and I would show work and I'd say this was executed, the needle work, because it combines painting and needle work, this was executed, the needle work was done by Jane Gaddie Thompson, or the needle work was done by so-and-so and so-and-so. And after my talk this woman stood up and she said, Judy, I can't believe that you named your collaborators.

Last week there was a lecture by a male artist who talked on and on about how he couldn't do his work without his two assistants. And during the question and answer period somebody asked them what were their names? And he said, I can't remember.

Oh my goodness. Well, I think you're an example to us all by doing it. I think it's very important. I was just going to say she described this time before your feminist art program as all art history programs being essentially the pyramids to Picasso, until someone like you actually created the first feminist art course on the West Coast. Well I often say that in my first decade, because of the pressures to suppress any hint of gender in my work, I tried really hard to do what was the best compliment you could get then was, oh, you make art like a man. And I really tried. I call it my period of being in male drag. And maybe if going back to your question, maybe if I got rewarded for it, you know, but I wasn't getting rewarded for it. And the price of not being able to be myself was just too high.

And so I just decided I was going to stop pretending I wasn't a woman. And that it didn't affect. It was even, it inflected my early work, you know, my color, my forms. Even though I was trying very hard to suppress it, it still came out because I'm an honest person at base. Also when I had been at UCLA, there were a lot of female students in the art program, and both more in undergraduate, but there were a lot in graduate school. But as you came into professional life, they all kind of disappeared. And so I thought, you know, after ten years, I had sort of come to consciousness in my studio, in my first ten years of practice dealing with all these issues. And I thought, you know, I wonder if there's a way to actually fuse my gender with my art.

But by then I had disconnected them so thoroughly. At least I tried. That I kind of didn't know how to do that, and I wanted to do that. When I went to Fresno, I set out to create a feminist art practice. I didn't exactly know how to bring those aspects of my identity together, and I thought to myself, if I started working with young students, female students, maybe I could encourage them to make art that didn't require them distancing themselves from their gender.

And by helping them, I could help myself. So I applied for a teaching job in Fresno, California, which is a couple hundred miles north of LA. I couldn't do it in L.A. I had to be away because, you know, one of the things I've done throughout my career is think against the culture. And it takes a lot of isolation to do that because the culture bears down on all of us, so much, and of course more so, the most in the centers of culture, like in America and New York and L.A.. So I had to be away to start thinking about how to do this. And then, CalArts was just starting and we did a show at the end of the year, in Fresno, of what I had been doing with my students.

And a lot of people from CalArts came and they asked me, and CalArts was then very radical, I mean, like really radical. So they invited me to bring my program to CalArts, where I would team teach it with Miriam Schapiro, the artist, which didn't last very long.

But between my team teaching, my pedagogy continued.

Absolutely. And then being there between 1974 and 1975 you created The Dinner Party, which by 1988 made its way to Australia. It was exhibited in the Melbourne's Exhibition Building. I mean, how was that? How did it feel to have The Dinner Party on the other side of the world?

Well, I actually felt very conflicted by the fact that there was an alternative tour because, you know, I'm an artist. I want to be in the major art museums. And it was Diane Gelon with whom I worked since 19, since the 1970s. She came to work with me on The Dinner Party, and now she's the president of the board of the Chicago Woodman Foundation.

It was Dianne who had worked, she was one of the first people to come to work on The Dinner Party. And she's like, I haven't spent four years of my life working on this piece for it to go into storage. Because, you know, when The Dinner Party went into storage after its first highly successful showing in San Francisco, The Dinner Party went into storage and the artists went into total shock. And Diane is the one, we were getting calls all the time from people all over saying, why isn't The Dinner Party coming to my town? Because your Museum won't show it, honey. So Diane worked with all these grassroots groups all over the world to mount the tour. And after San Francisco, it was shown at University of Clear-Lake outside of Houston in a black box theater.

And Diane still talks about the fact that when she showed me the space, I turned white as a ghost because, you know, it had just been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and it's the same thing in Australia. Although I'm very glad that the piece traveled to 16 venues around the world and was seen by so many people because it taught me a lot about the power of art, to the point that people actually organised to get it shown.

I mean, that's kind of unprecedented, but it was conflictful for me as an artist. But I remember coming to Australia, we actually had a great time in Melbourne.

Sorry because am I right in thinking that during the exhibition of The Dinner Party, it was accompanied by a women’s dinner which saw over 1200 women sit down together? Tell us about that.

But there were always these ancillary projects that would develop around The Dinner Party, like when it was shown in Frankfurt, where it was shown at a prestigious museum, they organised something called the Festival of a Thousand women at the newly renovated opera house, and a thousand women dressed up as women on the table and the floor.

Oh my God, that needs to happen again! But I'm aware that at the women's dinner, which was organized by the Art Register, you gave this incredible speech, I was really so struck reading it, you said so much of our precious heritage as women are artifacts, are painting, writing, needlework, music, have no homes.

As long as we do not provide permanent places for the treasures women create, we will continue to tread water and repeat ourselves. You said that in 1988. How does it feel looking back at that in 2024 and has much changed?

Well, you know, obviously there are many more exhibitions of women. But exhibitions don't shape art history, acquisitions shape art history. And even acquisitions can get stored in the basement.

So, for example, I know somebody who took over as director of a museum in Canada, and they had what was called the closet, and she went into the closet and it was all work by women.

Katie, as long as what women do in the world is not valued, what women make will continue to be subject to erasure, minimisation. You know, this is not the first time in history that women artists have become prominent. You may be noticing, number one, how many old lady women artists have suddenly been discovered, and two, how many like, oh my God, there were all these women working in Britain.

Oh, who knew. Oh my God, the work is so good. How could it have been completely erased? I mean, that has not changed. That's why Massimiliano Gioni’s show at the New Museum, Herstory, which included The City of Ladies, totally changed people's perceptions of my work, by including work by 90 women dating back six centuries. That is the historic context I discovered and that I have been working out of for all of my career, ever since I decided to get out of male drag.

And what it provided people was something that had previously been absent. A context to understand my work. Because even now, women's work is not properly contextualised when it's shown. I read a review about a woman who worked in needlework and it was compared to Andy Warhol, because that's important. It's important the art that men made.

So if you compare a woman's work to an important man, somehow it becomes important. But the tradition out of which it grew remains invisible.

But I mean I remember seeing that installation of The City of Ladies, and I remember, I think I went to the Met Museum or something the day before, and then going to the New Museum and just realising how much that ‘canon’, if we call it that, was missing from the default in a way.

And also, I think it made me realise when I look at this kind of thing, it just makes me think we're just missing out on this great art at the end of the day. I mean, what can we do as individuals, to push this along? I mean, how can we help change the system?

Katie, my dear, that's a question that will now be in your hands. You’ve got years ahead of you to figure it out. I've done as much as I can do to make clear how long we have to go yet. The issue is institutional change. How do you make that happen?

Totally. It's education from the ground up. And it's also the amount of women who are now, or people who care about gender representation, who are becoming senior in museums as well. And so it's exciting. I do think that

It's not just women. Just think about who did the New Museum show and who did the Serpentine show.

Oh no. Totally. It's people.

They’re men. They're male feminists. A lot of women who run museums are unbelievably anti-feminist. They are in thrall to patriarchal values. It's not about, you don't have to be a woman to be a feminist. And you don't have to be a man to be patriarchal. It's values Katie.  How do you change values?

Yeah. No. You're right. Exactly. But I want to ask, you've had such an incredible few years, especially in the past year. I mean 2024 alone, you've had this incredible exhibition in my hometown of London, you've had exhibitions coming off the back of the New Museum, and then also in Arles and now obviously this incredible acquisition in Australia.

Your show at the Serpentine was extraordinary in the sense that I was looking at work from 50 years ago, that was addressing issues that are the most pressing in our world today, such as climate and combating the climate crisis through the power of art and protest.  What's next for you and your work now?

Well, I would say that I'm doing very, very few public interviews because what time and energy I have left, I'm devoting to studio work, the work, our work on our foundation, which is focused on cementing our legacy.

And also I began working with the people who are responsible for the Judy Chicago Research portal, which is administered by Penn State. It ties together the five institutions that hold my archives the Schlesinger Library for the History of Women in America, Penn State, which has my art education. The Schlesinger has my papers going back 30 years and my journals, and my art education archive is at Penn State.

Parts of my visual archive are at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington. By the way, it is the only museum in the world devoted to women's cultural production. Also, the Nevada Museum of Art, which has my fireworks archive, and the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, which is putting together a comprehensive representation of my work and also acquired my print archive.

So included in those archives are the collaborative work I've done with Donald and other people. So working to make sure that my work will be there for people who want to find it, because one of the things that comforted me when I was working on The Dinner Party and discovering all these women before me who had overcome the obstacles I was encountering, I thought to myself, I may not know them.

I've been deprived of my heritage, as you said, but I can find them. And making sure that my work will be able to be found in the future is of utmost importance to me now.

Judy Chicago, thank you so much for this fantastic conversation, but also all that you do. I mean, it's thanks to you and your work that I have also been able to find so many people and through that, just find a history that was stolen from me.

But thanks to people like you, it is out there in the world. Thank you so much.

Thank you Katie for picking up what needs to be done. You're making a huge contribution.

Thank you. Judy. Well.