Book 30: The Birth Project by Judy Chicago

College was when I really got into art, especially feminist art, and Judy Chicago's name was usually mentioned. But because she was mentioned as though the reader/listener already knew all about her, and no images or other details were ever included, I figured she must not have been that important! I graduated in '09 and it was really only a decade ago that I got sick of having her name pop up but I still had no idea why, so I picked up a biography about her (which I still own, but it was published in 2007 so I'm quite a ways away from rereading it as part of this project). I had heard about and seen pictures of The Dinner Party, also in isolation as though everyone already knew about it, but at last I learned what it was and why it was! 

In one of my art history classes in college, my professor lamented the lack of images of birth in art - the art you see in museums. None of us in the class had realized this gap, and I guess this professor had never heard of The Birth Project, but we all just moved on with sad frustration. Judy Chicago discovered the gap in 1979 while finishing The Dinner Party, and immediately got to work creating art to fill it. I didn't know about this until roughly a decade ago, and I didn't know there was a book on it until I stumbled across it at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago two years ago! 

This is the first book in my personal library that's as old as I am, it was published when all of the 100some pieces of The Birth Project were finished but exhibiting them was still uncertain. How serendipitous that I was born when The Birth Project (and the Guerrilla Girls!) was born - that explains a lot about me! Judy Chicago wanted all of the pieces to be textiles, but she's no textile artist so she took on hundreds of volunteer needleworkers, weavers, knitters, crocheters, beaders, quilters, sewists, etc. The Dinner Party (if you're reading this thinking "I have no idea what that is," hold on until I get to my 2007 books or watch this) involved dozens of artists coming to one centralized art studio to work, but the artists who worked on The Birth Project stitched at home. Judy Chicago laments throughout the book that this is why it took 5 years to complete, and she was also consistently stunned at how many of the artists said that the graphic images of birth seemed more alive as their children consistently interrupted their work. As I'm working on The Women Religious Artists Project, every page of The Birth Project seemed to holler at me "this is why your work is important" as the artists I'm documenting chose to live very differently and these stories are just as important.

I've never seen any of The Birth Project pieces in real life; usually some of them live at the Brooklyn Museum but they were either on loan or archived when I went there two years ago. This piece, Birth Tear executed by Jane Gaddie Thompson, was the first image from the Project that I recall seeing and it always stuns me. I want to see any of them, but this one I'm driven to encounter in person. This seems to emphasize visually something that Judy Chicago wrote early on in the book, that she wanted to use textiles to create images of real experiences while every time she went to fabric/embroidery shops she was surrounded by cutesy bunnies. This is one of the reasons why I didn't want to stay in the Embroiderers' Guild of America and why I don't go to most quilt shows, I can respect the skill and technique but where are the people? Although I've never given birth, The Birth Project conveys to me the experience in varied, gritty, intense ways. Judy Chicago and her extensive team of textile artists successfully pushed the art medium towards something that no other artists had done!

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/352192.The_Birth_Project 


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