Exhibition
Judy Chicago: Herstory
10/12/23-03/03/24
Conversations · Exhibition-Related · Exhibition-Related
Atmospheres: Artists on Feminism and the Environment
Cover Image:
Photo: Suzie Howell. Courtesy Torkwase Dyson; Photo: Thatcher Keats. Courtesy Candice Hopkins; Photo: Toby Coulson. Courtesy Joan Jonas
For her Atmospheres series from the 1960s and 70s, Judy Chicago set off smoke bombs and pyrotechnics in various Californian landscapes to create dramatic, ephemeral performances. She “softened” and “feminized” the landscape, expanding her feminist politics to include a commitment to the natural world.
This conversation brings together artists who work across ecology, landscape, and liberatory politics to ask what’s at stake in working with and within the natural world today. How are social and environmental issues intertwined in artistic practice? And what impact does the legacy of 1970s ecological feminism have for artists today?
Artists Torkwase Dyson and Joan Jonas will discuss their work and their practices in relation to topics of feminism and the environment with moderator Candice Hopkins, Executive Director of Forge Project.
A recording of this conversation can be found on our YouTube channel and below:
Accessibility
Live CART captioning will be provided for this program by StenoCaptions.
American Sign Language interpretation for public programs is available free of charge upon request with three weeks’ advance notice.
For all accessibility questions or requests, please contact publicprograms@newmuseum.org.
About the Participants
Torkwase Dyson describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Examining human geography and the history of Black spatial liberation strategies, Dyson’s abstract works grapple with the ways space is perceived, imagined, and negotiated—particularly by black and brown bodies. Dyson has distilled a vocabulary of poetic forms to address the spaciousness of freedom and question what types of climates are born out of world-building.
Candice Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation and lives in Red Hook, New York. Her writing and curatorial practice explore the intersections of history, contemporary art, and Indigeneity. She is Executive Director of Forge Project, Taghkanic, NY. She is curator of the exhibition “Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination Since 1969,” currently on view at the Hessel Museum; and senior curator of the 2019 and 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art, which included Judy Chicago’s Atmospheres, and her live smoke sculpture, A Tribute to Toronto.
Joan Jonas is a world-renowned artist whose work encompasses a wide range of media including video, performance, installation, sound, text, and sculpture. Joan’s experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theater.
Sponsors
Support for Education and Public Engagement programs is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
We gratefully acknowledge the Bowery Council of the New Museum for its support of Education and Public Engagement Programs.
Education and community programs are supported, in part, by the American Chai Trust.
Endowment support is provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; the Skadden, Arps Education Programs Fund; and the William Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund for Education Programs at the New Museum.
Full support for “Judy Chicago: Herstory” can be viewed here.
