Judy Chicago – Just Create

The Dinner Party (detail). Ishtar place setting

THIS

What a great article about the creative process. And what a #BadassWoman!

When Judy Chicago’s piece, The Dinner Party, was first shown 40 years ago. It was maligned by most art critics. Revolutionary art usually is. But Judy simply kept following her vision, kept creating. And the rest of the world eventually caught up to her.

Now in her 70’s, Judy Chicago is still a take no prisoners kind of artist. I’m in awe.

I believe in art that is connected to real human feeling, that extends itself beyond the limits of the art world to embrace all people who are striving for alternatives in an increasingly dehumanized world. I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism.

~Judy Chicago, 1979

Read The NY Times article here.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/t-magazine/judy-chicago-dinner-party.html

“… She wants everyone to see her art and to understand it, so that it might change them and the world.

And it has. Once your eye is trained to see Chicago’s imprint, it is everywhere, and unmistakable. It’s in Petra Collins’s menstruation-positive T-shirts; in the forthcoming installation on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. by Zoe Buckman of a huge uterus drawn in neon tubing crowned with boxing gloves; in the pink “pussy hats” that are worn in opposition to Trump’s election. Images like these — symbolically overt, politically and anatomically in-your-face, forcing a public confrontation with sexism — are all descended from Chicago’s imagination…” ~Sasha Weiss, NY Times

🌙

What If?

Am I all that you project
and expect of me?

Am I

a good girl
and vicious brat?

a selfless oracle
and manipulative witch?

a perfect partner
and selfish cunt?

a great mom
and controlling bitch?

a clueless child
and wise woman?

WHO AM I?

What if I fit
all of your labels
and none of them
at all?

What if you see
what suits your reality
instead of
who I truly am?

What if
I am who I am
and no one really
knows me at all?

What if I am here
to be my own truth
without needing
you to agree?

What if I allow myself
to be free
to simply
be me?

~Nancy L

We Are All Holy

“The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy.
Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves,
the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves.”

~Terry Tempest Williams

Be WILD

Be wild.

Let your hair down
feel the life in your breath
embrace your animal body
laze in the sun
ground in the moist earth
flow with the rivers
run with the wind.
Get to know your inner wildness
the internal springs,
caves,
nocturnal beasts and invertebrates
the forgotten place where you hide
your wild self
the creature of instinct and intuition.
Be wild.
Let yourself go
where your heart wanders
when you sleep
dream about flying high
and diving deep
and finally realizing who
you really are.

– Alissa Wild

Speak

“My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.
What are the words you do not yet have?
What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day
and attempt to make your own,
until you sicken and die of them,
still in silence?

… And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty
that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth.
And that is not speaking.”

~Audre Lorde
feminist poet