When Women Rule the World: Judy Chicago in Thread February 10, 2009

Living legend of feminist art, Judy Chicago’s place on the landscape of contemporary textile practice is a significant one. Best known for her groundbreaking sculptural installation, The Dinner Party (1974-1979), Chicago has spent decades exploring the possibilities of “thread as brushstroke.” This exhibition surveys some of Chicago’s most important contributions in cloth, highlighting both key and lesser-known works dating from 1971 to present. From macramé to needle point to airbrushed quilts, Chicago employs “technique as content” in her major projects selected for this survey exhibition including The Birth Project (1980-1985), The Holocaust Project (1993) and Resolutions: A Stitch in Time (1994 to present). This exhibition centralizes the labour-intensive nature of Chicago’s textile work as a metaphor for investing in the ideas, values, histories and provocations in her artwork.

Five artists who take this notion to heart are profiled alongside Chicago, underscoring her ongoing and unmistakable influence and creating an intergenerational dialogue with Chicago’s most recent work “If Women Ruled the World” (2008): Orly Cogan, (New York, NY); Wednesday Lupypciw (Calgary, Alberta); Cat Mazza (Troy, NY); Gillian Strong (Halifax, Nova Scotia); and Ginger Brooks Takahashi (New York, NY).

Official Website: http://www.textilemuseum.ca/