Art & Creativity Quote by Judy Chicago

There’s a deliberate double-move here: Judy Chicago opens with a sighing “Ah, well,” then immediately refuses to let the conversation stay tidy. She grants the utopian wish - a world where gender doesn’t “figure so prominently” - while insisting that the lived reality of making art is messier than slogans. The paired “Of course” answers sound casual, even obvious, but they’re doing sharp rhetorical work: she’s preempting two predictable demands placed on women artists at once. First, the demand to be “past” gender, to treat it as an outdated category; second, the demand to foreground gender constantly, to speak as a representative type.

Chicago’s subtext is that both expectations are traps. To pretend gender is irrelevant is to accept a supposedly neutral art world that historically coded “serious” as male. To perform gender as a constant artistic mission is to be boxed into a special-interest aisle: “women’s art” as a sidebar to the main story. Her insistence that she doesn’t think of herself as a woman “when I go to make art” is less disavowal than refusal: she won’t let identity be the script that governs the studio.

The context matters. Chicago’s career is inseparable from feminist art’s fight for institutional visibility (The Dinner Party didn’t enter museums as a polite suggestion). This quote captures the tension at the movement’s core: gender as a political fact you can’t ignore, and as a creative constraint you can’t let dictate the terms of imagination. She wants liberation without amnesia.