Judy Chicago Essay

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The Feminist Art movement is a constellation of artists, critics, and art historians; emerged to end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record. Women have always been seen as sexualised objects of desire in art history, thus these women artists rebelled by producing an undeniable presence of artwork that was unforgettable. This newly found freedom led women artists, from Judy Chicago to Hannah Wilke, to rebel against the constraints of tradition, creating a new paradigm for the female subject in the art world.
Judy Chicago was one of the pioneers of Feminist art in the 1970s, a movement that endeavoured to reflect women's lives, call attention to women's roles as artists, and alter the conditions under which contemporary art was produced and received.
Often depicted by men, when women portrayed the female body it became a powerful weapon against the social constructs of gender.

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Many feminist artists claim her work as being contradictory, however her intention was to show the historical responsibility that was associated with women. Chicago used this scene because of its associations with the stereotypical everyday jobs of a women; cooking, cleaning, and setting up the table. She decided that since men had their Last Supper, women would therefore host a Dinner Party. Alongside the feminist artists, many female viewers took offence at the imagery as the plates at The Dinner Party were inspired by the shape of the vulva. Chicago’s use of the vulvic shape was to ‘display traditional masculinist aesthetics strategies’ so that the vagina, and women’s bodies could be the active subject rather than the passive object. The vagina, centre of a woman’s sexuality, became the metaphorical battleground for women’s independence and

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