The Evolution of Rainbow Pickett

Born in 1939, the American artist Judy Chicago is one of the pre-eminent feminist artists of the last 60 years. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, performance, fireworks and pyrotechnics before she created such groundbreaking works as the mid-1970s The Dinner Party — a monumental installation celebrating the accomplishment of women through the ages — Chicago created a series of radical minimal sculptures. Jennifer Higgie talked with the artist about the National Gallery’s acquisition of her iconic sculpture Rainbow Pickett 1965/2021.

Jennifer Higgie: I’m thrilled the National Gallery has acquired Rainbow Pickett, which has a long and complicated history. Firstly, what does its title refer to?

Judy Chicago: It’s named after the American soul singer Wilson Pickett, who I was listening to at the time. The rainbow refers to the spectral colours I was exploring. I was doing a lot of big-scale sculptures at the time and had studied for a masters in both painting and sculpture, so it’s a combination of both.

What was the response to Rainbow Pickett in the mid-1960s?

Its soft colours actually challenged the accepted minimalist aesthetic at the time. This was a problem for the male-centred art scene, starting with my college professors.

What did they object to?

That the colours were too feminine.

Was the idea of a rainbow considered too feminine, too?

[Laughs] Yes! Classic sexism, but does misogyny make sense?

What did you think of Rainbow Pickett once you’d finished it?

I thought, and I still think, it’s one of the best works of my career.

What was the conceptual thinking behind the sculpture?

Jesus, I mean, it was the 1960s! [Laughs] Experimentation was just something in the Los Angeles air at the time. I was doing a lot of work with spectral colour and colour studies. I couldn’t solve aesthetic problems in my head; I had to do it all on paper.

What was your process?

I would lay out the colours in a sequence and in drawings, slowly moving the sequence around, reinterpreting cold colours into warm colours to see what the different emotive associations would be. It’s like when I started doing my firework pieces; I would lay out the fireworks in circles of colour in the same way and then watch them blend in the air. I made a spectral colour wheel for a performance street-piece where I created a ground of smoke. As the smoke rose, it was illuminated by the colour, which was the impetus of my 50 fireworks and coloured smoke pieces. I was also exploring the colours that would become the basis of the painting series Pasadena Lifesavers in 1970. Rainbow Pickett is related to these works, definitely.

Who were the artists you were interested in at the time?

It was a period when the prevailing idea was women had no history and there had never been any great women artists. People would constantly tell me that I couldn’t be an artist and a woman; also the biggest compliment you could get was that you painted like a man. I was surrounded by male artists and was looking at male art. I learned a lot from the Los Angeles artist Billy Al Bengston, who taught at UCLA for one year when I was a graduate student. He let me come to his studio and it was the first real artist’s studio I had ever seen. I said to him, ‘My God, this must cost you a lot of money.’ And he said— and now this was a lot of money in the 1960s —‘Yes, it’s $700 a month.’ And I said ‘$700. Do you have a job?’ He said, ‘Yes, I have a job. Being an artist is my full-time job. Every month I figure something’s going to happen and that is how I live my life.’ Now, most women would never do that, at least most women of my generation but that is how I lived my life, without any financial security. Also, he gave me a really good piece of advice about reviews — never read them, just count the column inches and the number of photos. Given the vitriolic reviews I’ve received over the years, it was a lifesaving piece of advice. The other person I learned a lot from was my autobody-school painting teacher, Percy Jeffries; he was a professional car painter. The class was 250 men and me. I probably learned more in my two months there than I did in six years of university art education. What I learned was that making art involved making objects, which I had never thought about. He said to me, ‘Judy, there’s no such thing as perfection. There’s only the illusion of perfection, and I’m going to teach you how to achieve that.’ And that became the hallmark of my work: flawless surfaces, perfect blending.

I read that in 1965 you initially wanted to make Rainbow Pickett in steel but you couldn’t afford it.

Yeah, I thought, ‘oh God! It would be so great in metal’ but it was impossible. I mean, I didn’t have that kind of support or sponsorship; it was out of the question.

So what was its original incarnation made from?

Plywood covered in canvas so I could paint it easily.

What happened to it?

Despite it being in the exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966, it wasn’t sold and I couldn’t afford to put it in storage, so I had to destroy it. It wasn’t the only one — I had to destroy a lot of other big pieces from the 1960s. It broke my heart. Since then, I’ve been fortunate that there have been individuals, male and female, who have supported me, but still, I’ve had a long struggle over my six-decade career.

To give it its full title, Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors was the first major exhibition in the United States showcasing minimalist sculpture at the time. You were one of only three women in the show?

Yeah, there were over 40 artists in the show, and only three were women. Rolf Nelson, whose LA gallery I was showing with at the time got me into the show. But at the time I didn’t understand the significance. Nobody told me that if you’re in a big New York show, you get on an airplane and you go to the opening!

How was Rainbow Pickett critically received?

Apparently [the eminent critic] Clement Greenberg singled it out as a strong work. He walked around the show with the most important curator in southern California, Walter Hopps, who, a couple of months earlier, had visited the studio where I was working in Los Angeles but had refused to look at Rainbow Pickett, which broke my heart.

Why not? What happened?

I wrote about it in my first autobiography, Through the Flower, although I didn’t mention Hopps by name. But he must have read it, because years later, I was in Washington for a show and we had breakfast or lunch or something. And he said, ‘I know you hated me.’ And I knew he was referring to what happened with Rainbow Pickett. I asked him why he wouldn’t look at it all those years ago and he said: ‘But you have to understand, at that time in the art world, women were either groupies or wives. So what was I to make of the fact that your work was stronger than 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.’

What a strange and terrible thing to say.

The thing is though, Jennifer, if you think about my career, that’s what the art world did to me. Why did it work so hard to keep my work out of the mainstream, even though I had built such a big audience? Here’s an example. In 1980, when The Dinner Party was first shown at the Brooklyn Museum, this guy who wrote for the New York Times Book Review visited it three times and he saw long queues of people waiting to get in to see it. And you know what he wrote? That all those people were wrong. I tell you, it’s a miracle I’ve survived.

Well, you’re on fire now! I recently visited your solo show here in London at the Serpentine Gallery and it was packed. Going back to 2004, Rainbow Pickett was recreated for another important exhibition, A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958–1968 at LA MOCA.

Yes, they built it out of MDF, which is really heavy, and covered it in canvas and painted it. They used an image of it on the banners outside the museum, and I was teaching in southern California at the time so I could supervise its reconstruction.

How was it seeing Rainbow Pickett in this new incarnation?

It was great. But even then, it didn’t sell.

So, it must have been amazing when, after all these decades, in 2021, Rainbow Pickett was finally made in steel.

Yeah, it was my gallerist, Jeffrey Deitch who suggested we remake it in metal, which I had always intended. And it’s fantastic! It’s painted with Matthews Paint, which Disney uses for a lot of its outdoor sculptures. The colour and surface are more durable than in the original.

Do you think finally seeing it made in the material you always intended it to be in has healed your broken heart a little?

God yes! Rainbow Pickett has had a happy ending.

Do you still listen to Wilson Pickett?

No, I don’t. Actually, I don’t listen to that much music in my studio anymore. I’ve gotten to a point where I love silence.

Judy Chicago was born in Chicago, USA, in 1939. In 2024, she has had major solo exhibitions at The Serpentine Gallery, London, UK and LUMA, Arles, France. In 2023, the first comprehensive New York museum survey of work by Judy Chicago opened at the New Museum.

Rainbow Pickett will be on display in Know My Name: Global from April 2025.

Join Judy Chicago for an exclusive conversation as part of the 2025 Betty Churcher AO Memorial Oration on Thursday 6 March.

This story was first published in The Annual 2024.