TY - JOUR
T1 - Blood works
T2 - Judy Chicago and menstrual art since 1970
AU - Rostvik, Camilla Mork
N1 - Many thanks to Judy Chicago and her studio for rights to use Red Flag, and for answering questions. Thanks to Deborah Diemente at the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts, for providing the image of Red Flag. Thanks to Bee Hughes for image rights. Many thanks to the staff at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library for Women’s History in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Thanks to the P&G archive team for help with images and image rights. A million thanks to Dr Catherine Spencer for context on 1970s feminism and support. Thanks to Dr Luke Gartland for information about the history of photolithography. Thanks to the editors and reviewers for important suggestions for improvements. Thanks to Harry Finley at MUM. A version of this paper was presented at the Association for Art History conference in Brighton and at the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research in Colorado, both in 2019 – thanks to listeners for excellent questions. This research was funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Grant entitled ‘The Painters Are In: The Visual History of Menstruation since 1970’.
PY - 2019/12/3
Y1 - 2019/12/3
N2 - In the span of two years, Judy Chicago created three artworks about menstruation. First, the unpublished play My Menstrual Life in December 1971, in collaboration with University of California, Berkeley political scientist Isabel Welsh. Second, she made the photolithograph Red Flag in 1971 (Fig. 1). Third, in 1972 Chicago created the installation Menstruation Bathroom as part of the feminist exhibition Womanhouse. In the almost fifty years that have passed, menstrual discourse has ballooned as activists, academics and artists reach larger audiences than ever before, exemplified in popular discourse when the magazine Newsweek defined 2015 as the ‘Year the fight to end period shaming is going mainstream’.1 In many of such recent articles about menstruation and activism, Chicago’s 1970s menstrual artworks illustrate this story, but are seldom discussed in detail as works of art. This article aims to answer the questions that mainstream media and art historical literature have largely overlooked. How did Chicago come to make three works about menstruation in the early 1970s, and what can this tell us about the decade? How did the works make the journey from being taboo to being iconic, and how were they received (or not) depending on medium and timing? Do we appreciate the radical gesture of the artwork today, as a new generation of artists explore menstruation while receiving praise as well as censorship? This article presents the history of these three works, exploring how they were created in a state of taboo, and have ended up as icons of a movement calling for menstrual equity.
AB - In the span of two years, Judy Chicago created three artworks about menstruation. First, the unpublished play My Menstrual Life in December 1971, in collaboration with University of California, Berkeley political scientist Isabel Welsh. Second, she made the photolithograph Red Flag in 1971 (Fig. 1). Third, in 1972 Chicago created the installation Menstruation Bathroom as part of the feminist exhibition Womanhouse. In the almost fifty years that have passed, menstrual discourse has ballooned as activists, academics and artists reach larger audiences than ever before, exemplified in popular discourse when the magazine Newsweek defined 2015 as the ‘Year the fight to end period shaming is going mainstream’.1 In many of such recent articles about menstruation and activism, Chicago’s 1970s menstrual artworks illustrate this story, but are seldom discussed in detail as works of art. This article aims to answer the questions that mainstream media and art historical literature have largely overlooked. How did Chicago come to make three works about menstruation in the early 1970s, and what can this tell us about the decade? How did the works make the journey from being taboo to being iconic, and how were they received (or not) depending on medium and timing? Do we appreciate the radical gesture of the artwork today, as a new generation of artists explore menstruation while receiving praise as well as censorship? This article presents the history of these three works, exploring how they were created in a state of taboo, and have ended up as icons of a movement calling for menstrual equity.
U2 - 10.1093/oxartj/kcz021
DO - 10.1093/oxartj/kcz021
M3 - Article
SN - 0142-6540
VL - 42
SP - 335
EP - 353
JO - Oxford Art Journal
JF - Oxford Art Journal
IS - 3
ER -