OPENING: Judy Chicago at David Richard Gallery

Judy Chicago, known most famously for her feminist artworks like The Dinner Party (1979) and Birth Project (1980 - 85), will be showing recent works in glass, bronze, and ceramics at the David Richard Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. On view from June 14 through July 26, 2014, the exhibition entitled "Heads Up," will be up during the artist's 75th birthday on July 20th.

Chicago has frequently used craft materials with a fine art sensibility throughout her career, embracing a myriad of mediums such as painting, drawing, printmaking, china painting, ceramics, tapestry, needlework, pyrotechnics, and even auto-body painting. She has had glassmaking skills in her arsenal for a little over a decade now, first exploring the medium with a 16-foot long stained glass triptych titled Rainbow Shabbat (1985 - 1993), which served as the final image of the large-scale traveling exhibiton, Holocaust Project: From Darkness to Light.

Her interest in glass expanded into creating two-dimensional imagery with fused glass, metal leaf, and gilding and painting techniques on flat glass, in addition to casting three-dimensional objects. While her earlier artworks were primarily feminist in nature, as her career progressed she has explored more generally what it means to be human. Glass has proven to be an effective medium to achieve this artistic goal – as a typically transparent material, she uses it to reveal what is below the surface and is shared throughout human experience.

Her exploration of a humanist theme manifests itself in the most expressive parts of the human body: the hands, arms, and face, which have been a focus of her work in the past decade. With the assistance of skilled artisans as an Artist-in-Residence at Pilchuck Glass School in 2003, she began working on her "Chicago in Glass" series (2003), a collection of cast hands and arms conveying powerful gestures, such as open welcoming hands or a fist raised in protest. The exposure of muscles and veins beneath the skin in these works emphasize the power of hands as a prevailing communicative tool. In 2006, she examined the expression of human emotion with the "Toby Heads" series, cast glass busts relying on the position of the eyes and mouth and the pull on the skin to outwardly allude to the psychological state of the subject. Additionally, these heads are hairless and thus devoid of a gender, making them seemingly more representative of the spectrum of human emotion.

Again featuring the face, this summer’s "Heads Up" exhibition features cast glass, bronze, and ceramic heads, as well as painted flat glass and watercolor studies on paper. The paintings explore not only the external appearance of a face in a certain emotional state, but also the role of the muscles and the skull in the kinetics of expressing that emotion. The works in this show investigate realities of the human condition such as disappointment, envy, anger, and sadness, and the behaviors of crying, frowning, and faking a smile, which will be forever shared by all individuals. 

IF YOU GO: