This past Saturday I had the opportunity to attend part of the Judy Chicago symposium to see the Judy Chicago keynote lecture. I was immediately impressed by how organized the event was- they had name tags printed for everyone, with schedules and places printed on the back, in case of confusion about where the next event was. After finding a seat in the auditorium, I took out my notebook so that I could be prepared to write down important quotes or things I noticed from the lecture.
While I enjoyed Judy Chicago's talk, I thought that in some ways it came off as a brief outline of her book, to encourage us to buy it. She talked about her time she spent teaching college student's in the 70's, and how after a break from teaching to concentrate on her own studio work, she returned in the late 90's/early 2000's and still had to deal with many of the same feminist concerns that she had to deal with earlier; no permanent strides seemed to have stuck. I thought this and the one or two anecdotes (like a female student at Duke who had been drawing eviscerated torso, and because Judy Chicago was well versed in feminist art she was able to identify this as a cry for help from the student who had been sexually assaulted, whereas her male professors at duke had just said that maybe these images should be hung from I-beams to display them) that punctuated this part of her lecture was very interesting, but these were few and far between. Mostly it was overview of the different colleges she has worked at in the time that she returned to teaching.
I was also upset by her comment about current studio cultures and college age artists producing a lot of bad art. This was a comment she made toward the end of the lecture, and it is possible I was oversensitive to it because I am currently an art education student, taking studio classes and making art. Perhaps it is a naive perspective on my part, but I am very curious as to why we are producing bad art- what make it bad? The art world has changed vastly from when Judy Chicago was in school to today, and art styles and what is popular isn't the same at all. I don't think it was a fair comment to generalize most of today's student art as bad.
However, there were many things that I appreciated from the lecture as well. I liked how she emphasized that interdisciplinary communication should be improved between the Studio Art, Art History, and Art Education departments. (I vehemently agree with this sentiment, which is a large part of why I am double majoring in Art History and Art Education.) I was talking with one of the Art history grad students on the Art History department field trip to New York, and she was telling me how she did her undergraduate degree in studio art, and that some graduate programs would not take majors other than art history. This is odd, because I would think that someone who is more familiar with the art making process, rather than just the theory behind it would be more likely to better understand an artwork on a deeper level than just a framework of how it might have been done.
I also liked her thoughts on how art in the K-12 curriculum should be implemented- that they should be shown all the possibilities and directions to go with making art, and the variety of ways to connect with art, rather than just being given a simple craft. This idea, of making art accessible and relevant to students has been the focus of my art education classes this semester, and her comment about "integrating sensitivity to gender and diversity, promoting content based curricula, that is flexible and adaptable and not the product of only one person's thinking," is a pretty apt summary of all the main points we have touched on for this class.
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