BALTIC presents the first major UK survey of pioneering feminist artist, author and educator Judy Chicago.
The exhibition spans Chicago’s fifty-year career, from her early actions in the desert in the 1970s, to her most recent series, The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction (2013–16), which has not been previously shown outside of the US.
Judy Chicago explores the artist’s work from the perspective of the human condition, connecting birth and death with the emotional journeys experienced by the artist whilst highlighting Chicago’s ongoing concern with the devastating effects of climate change on the natural world.
The Birth Project (1980–85) is presented in dialogue with The End, linking the two extremes of being – birth and death. Alongside this, the detailed series of drawings and watercolours constituting Autobiography of a Year (1993–94) and My Accident (1986) offer a glimpse into the emotions the artist experienced over the course of one year and the impact of an accident in her life.
The exhibition also includes a selection of photographs from Chicago’s iconic Atmosphere series (1967–2017), which proposes a feminist approach to Land Art. A triptych of photographs from A Purple Poem for Miami (2019) will be seen for the first time in a commission for BALTIC’s entrance area lightbox.
The exhibition runs from November 16, 2019 – April 19, 2020.