With Judy Chicago: To Sustain the Vision, Géraldine Gourbe continues the reinscription of the artist’s work begun in the exhibition Los Angeles, les années cool (Villa Arson Nice, 2018). A player in the histories of minimal art, land art and light and space, Judy Chicago has also engaged in a social and political construction of the figure of the artist. The three essays brought together in this publication, along with iconography and previously unpublished documents, accompany a shift in focus on the artist’s work from the author’s inclusive feminist point of view.

Judy Chicago says she wants to live as long as possible, not to transcend her mortal condition, but to be around as her works successively find recognition. A woman holding out against all odds: such is the image of an artist more a visionary than the pioneer she has so often been described as. Unlike the pioneers, Chicago has never joined the “greats” of the white, modernist, Eurocentric canon. Rather she has avoided this historical snare, urging instead the alternatives of To Sustain the Vision. Something so necessary in these dystopian days.

Géraldine Gourbe is a philosopher, author, art critic, and exhibition curator.