"There's no question that many more women artists are showing worldwide now than they were when I was a young woman, and that's really great"
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Progress gets framed here as a visible headcount, and Judy Chicago knows exactly why that matters. Coming of age in an art world that treated “women artists” like a contradiction in terms, Chicago isn’t offering a warm-and-fuzzy celebration. She’s registering a measurable shift: women are “showing worldwide,” meaning they’re not just making work, they’re being exhibited, circulated, legitimized by the machinery that decides what counts as culture.
The line’s power is in its plainness. “There’s no question” has the ring of someone who has spent decades hearing the same questions: Are women’s shows a trend? Is feminism in art still necessary? Is the canon already fixed? Chicago shuts that down with an almost bureaucratic certainty, then lands on “that’s really great” with a careful, contained optimism. It reads less like victory and more like hard-earned acknowledgment that public visibility is one battlefield that can actually be tallied.
The subtext is tougher than the surface. Showing is not the same as being collected, reviewed seriously, taught in survey courses, or granted the kind of mythic genius narrative male artists still inherit by default. Chicago’s own career - from The Dinner Party onward - made her a lightning rod for precisely this gatekeeping: institutions could display the work while dismissing its politics as “craft,” “activism,” or “women’s issues.”
So the sentence is both a nod to change and a reminder of what change requires: pressure, organization, and a refusal to let access be treated as a favor. The optimism is real, but it’s edged with memory.
The line’s power is in its plainness. “There’s no question” has the ring of someone who has spent decades hearing the same questions: Are women’s shows a trend? Is feminism in art still necessary? Is the canon already fixed? Chicago shuts that down with an almost bureaucratic certainty, then lands on “that’s really great” with a careful, contained optimism. It reads less like victory and more like hard-earned acknowledgment that public visibility is one battlefield that can actually be tallied.
The subtext is tougher than the surface. Showing is not the same as being collected, reviewed seriously, taught in survey courses, or granted the kind of mythic genius narrative male artists still inherit by default. Chicago’s own career - from The Dinner Party onward - made her a lightning rod for precisely this gatekeeping: institutions could display the work while dismissing its politics as “craft,” “activism,” or “women’s issues.”
So the sentence is both a nod to change and a reminder of what change requires: pressure, organization, and a refusal to let access be treated as a favor. The optimism is real, but it’s edged with memory.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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