Chicago is Everywhere

Orginial Posting -- http://goo.gl/jNgd0i

We arrived at Judy Chicago's hotel room expecting to be greeted by a handler or assistant, but were surprised to find that the soon-to-be 75 year-old artist answered the door herself. She was wearing a sweatshirt from Pyro Spectaculars, the fireworks engineers working with her on her upcoming large-scale performance piece in Prospect Park, A Butterfly for Brooklyn. The sweatshirt was the same sort of baggy, pastel memento worn by women of her age to commemorate a trip to Las Vegas or Fort Lauderdale—but instead, this one had a small embroidery of fireworks over the heart.

 A Butterfly for Brooklyn is the capstone event of what Chicago refers to as her year-long "national retrospective." This year, she has shows at the Mana Contemporary, Harvard's Schlesinger Library, the Palmer Museum in Pennsylvania, the Oakland Museum of California, and several others around the country. "Chicago in L.A.," which just opened at the Brooklyn Museum, is one of the larger and more exciting ones, as it sheds light on Chicago's first 10 years of artistic practice in Los Angeles in the 1960s. It was a time and place where women in art were not taken seriously, and, as Chicago explained, a body of work that her magnum opus The Dinner Party overshadowed.