Judy Chicago, the internationally acclaimed feminist and Jewish artist, who will keynote the Kol Nashim/All Women Jewish Celebration of the Arts and Learning Shabbaton and Conference, sponsored by Nishmah and the Jewish Community Center, has found a way to blend her sensibilities as both a woman and a Jew through her artistic creations. The weekend program begins Friday, March 7, at the Crowne Plaza in Clayton, and on that evening, another major figure in feminism and the arts, novelist and poet Marge Piercy, will speak. Chicago’s keynote address will be delivered on Sunday, March 9, following another address by Rabbi Karyn Kedar.

Chicago agreed to an exclusive telephone interview with the St. Louis Jewish Light from her studio and residence in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The artist has previously been interviewed by the Jewish Light in 1980 after she spoke about her work at a program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, which focused on her “signature” piece, “The Dinner Party,” which depicts famous historic, mythical and biblical women, and in 1993, when she spoke at the St. Louis Jewish Book Festival on her acclaimed “Holocaust Project,” then her most explicitly Jewish work, in which she collaborated with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman. In those earlier interviews and in the most recent telephone interview, Chicago discussed her journey from an artist whose primary focus centered on women’s issues to her current range of interests which embraces her Jewish background as well.

Coincidentally, Chicago’s appearance at the Nishmah-JCC All Women Jewish Celebration comes in the immediate aftermath of the publication of the first definitive biography of the artist, Becoming Judy Chicago, by Gail Levin, biographer, art historian and curator of Landmark exhibitions, and professor of art history, American studies and women’s studies at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Levin, who previously published the definitive biography Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, is also a major essay contributor to the publication, Judy Chicago: Jewish Identity, edited and with a foreword by Jean Bloch Rosensaft, with essays by Laura Kruger and Gail Levin, published by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum in New York.

On page 8 of the above publication is a reproduction of a mixed media work by Chicago titled, “Everyone Was Going to See Who She Really Was, from Autobiography of a Year,” done in 1993, the year she and her husband photographer Donald Woodman finished the Holocaust project. Levin describes this work, as follows: “In this self-portrait, she depicts herself stripped bare, nude, with a Jewish star visible on her chest, from which she is bleeding, a mark of the emotional anguish she felt at revealing herself. To make absolutely certain that the viewer got her message, she had written the work’s title across her legs and the words ‘woman’ and ‘Jew’ above her right and left arms. The event that prompted this drawing was her anxiety over the impending debut of the Holocaust Project at the Spertus Museum in Chicago.”

In her initial interview with the St. Louis Jewish Light back in 1980, Chicago, who takes her professional name from her native city, stressed that while she had feelings about her Jewish and ethnic background, which included being descended from 31 generations of rabbis, including the Vilna Gaon, her principle focus was on redressing the degraded status of women artists and their works in the artistic establishment that existed at the time. Over the years, and especially after she and Woodman did and completed the Holocaust Project, Chicago’s Jewish concerns rose to the level of her concerns as a woman artist, as graphically depicted in “Everyone Was Going to See Who She Really Was.”

In her interview with the St. Louis Jewish Light, Chicago said she was looking forward to participating in the Nishmah-JCC All Women Celebration of the Arts and Learning Shabbaton and Conference, and to sharing the program with Marge Piercy, whose work she admires. “The idea of the conference appeals to me both as a woman artist and as a Jewish artist,” Chicago said.

Chicago was born Judith Sylvia Cohen, daughter of Arthur M. Cohen and May Levinson Cohen in July 1939, in Chicago. Her father had been descended from the 31 generations of rabbis, but had decided to move in a different direction, becoming a secular Jewish labor organizer. “As the youngest and brightest male in his family, he was supposed to carry on the family tradition, but he rebelled as a child and refused to go to cheder.” Both of her parents encouraged Chicago’s artistic career.

Chicago first attained national and international notice for her major and “signature” work, “The Dinner Party, completed in the 1970s, and designed to “redress the omission of women from much of Western history and culture.” The work is an open, triangular table set on a porcelain floor, on which are 39 place settings, each of them representing a symbolic expression of 39 major female figures in mythology, history and religion, covering the total span of Western culture. The floor is set with 2,300 porcelain tiles, inscribed with the names of 999 names of other women who had an impact on religion, mythology or literature.”

The work traveled for years to various venues around the nation, but was often rejected by more “establishment” museums, including the Saint Louis Art Museum, which questioned whether to work was an example of art or craftsmanship. “The Dinner Party” now has a permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, in a special space built specifically to keep it on permanent display,” said Chicago in the interview. She added that over the years the number and variety of museums across the country has increased, such as Contemporary Museum in St. Louis, which are more open to non-traditional artistic works, and even old-line, mainstream art museums are increasingly more open to innovative works.

“The Holocaust Project: From Darkness Into Light,” premiered in October 1993 at the Spertus Museum in Chicago, traveled to museums around the United States until 2002, and selections from the project continue to be exhibited. The Holocaust Project involved eight years of inquiry, travel, study, and artistic creation; it includes a series of images merging Chicago’s painting with the photography of her husband Donald Woodman, as well as works in stained glass and tapestry designed by Chicago and executed by skilled artisans.

Chicago said she enjoys using glass in her artistic creations because “glass combines both great beauty and extreme fragility.”

Judy Chicago also has published numerous books, essays and poems, including her early autobiography, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (1975); The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage (1979) Holocaust Project: From Darkness Into Light, (1993) and Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist, (1996). She is also the author of a popular poem, “Eden Once Again,” which is included in the prayerbook of the Reconstructionist Jewish movement and in the alternative service prayer services of numerous synagogues.

In her biography of Chicago, Gail Levin quotes the artist on one of her motivations for doing The Holocaust Project. “She has pointed out that to those outside the Jewish community, ‘there is incomplete knowledge, indifference and ignorance about the subject of the Holocaust, a ‘blame the victim’ attitude, a lack of understanding about the importance of an exhibition that would extend awareness about the Holocaust beyond the Jewish community. It’s a sign of her success that an African-American male student told Chicago in the discussion following her classroom lecture at a college showing The Holocaust Project: ‘This is the first time that I can relate to the Jews.'”

Levin also quotes Michael Nutkiewicz, then the assistant dean of the Cleveland College of Jewish Studies, who go over his “initial fears…that she would trivialize or sensationalize the Holocaust,” commenting, “I watched the evolution of a vivid and imaginative work that challenges us to think about genocide, the Holocaust, responsibility, Jewishness and being part of humanity.”

Levin also relates an incident in Judy Chicago’s journey back to her Jewish roots after a non-Jewish poet, Harvey Mudd, who dealt with the Holocaust in what she felt was a “fatuous way.” Chicago recalls sharing her feelings with her husband, Donald Woodman, noting, “Despite my radical political background, I cannot remember any discussion of the Holocaust during my childhood.” She began to question why this was the case, according to Levin, who adds, “While in New York, she visited the YIVO archive on Eastern European Jewish culture, where she had sought out a photograph of the tomb of her ancestor, the Vilna gaon, about who her father used to tell her. She wondered why this figure and the 23 generations of rabbis in his family were so important to him (her father), an ‘atheist, a Marxist & a rebel against the tradition he was brought up in.'”

Chicago told the Jewish Light that she was fascinated by the career of the Vilna Gaon, the towering Torah scholar “who was said to have known the entire Bible backwards and forwards.” The Vilna Gaon, who rose from his sickbed to oppose the Hasidic teachings of the Baal Shem Tov, and whose reputation for being an all-time genius of Torah remains intact, is part of Judy Chicago’s ancestry and heritage. The famous artist, whose initial major concerns centered on women’s issues, continues to care deeply about the status of woman and being a woman, and now she cares as deeply about her status as a member of the Jewish people. Both of these sensibilities will be expressed in her keynote talk at the Nishmah-JCC All Women Celebration next month.

For more information on the conference, call Ronit Sherwin at Nishmah, 314-862-2777, or Sara Winkelman at the JCC, 314-432-5700.