A Future Defined by Needle and Thread

Toward the end of working on her “Holocaust Project” (1985-1993), Judy Chicago found herself perilously close to the heart of despair.

“With my husband, Donald Woodman, a photographer, we spent eight years immersed in the darkness of the Holocaust,” she says about the work, which combined his photography and her painting to convey the tragedy of that period of history. “It brought us face to face with a lot of things in the world that are deeply unjust and deeply disturbing. At the end, we had to make a decision: Would we succumb to the kind of despair that can engulf us? Even in the face of what we had learned, in that darkness, we had to find some way to choose hope.”

Chicago’s way was to begin a new project, one designed to celebrate positive human values and one that would let her keep faith with the Jewish mandate “Choose life.” She turned once again to a favorite way of working--in collaboration--and to the feminist themes and art forms that have marked her career for nearly 30 years. The result is “Resolutions: A Stitch in Time,” 19 fabric-based works, most of which combine needlework and painting, plus one wood sculpture. The exhibition opens next Sunday at the Skirball Cultural Center.

Hailing from Chicago--hence the adopted surname--the artist arrived in Los Angeles in 1957 to study at UCLA. Dissatisfied with male domination in the art world, she later founded feminist art programs at Fresno State University and, with Miriam Schapiro, at CalArts. In her first major work, “The Dinner Party” (1974-79), she established her signature concerns and working method. Created in L.A., the installation put her on the art map. It featured 39 table settings commemorating 39 great--if somewhat forgotten--women in history, with individually designed plates and table runners. During its tour to some 16 American cities, about 1 million people saw it. Since then, Chicago has alternated between major collaborative multimedia installations and her own drawings and paintings.

“Resolutions” dictated a return to collaboration for emotional and pragmatic reasons.

“I wanted some joy [via] collaboration,” says Chicago, speaking by phone from her New Mexico studio. “And since I can’t stitch and I can’t sew, it was a natural to go to the people with whom I’d worked before, with whom I shared values.” (Fourteen of 17 needleworkers on “Resolutions” are veterans of previous Chicago projects.)

One weekend in 1994, she gathered half a dozen friends in her kitchen to discuss the idea of creating a values-based project. Eventually, they settled on seven topics to emphasize: family, responsibility, conservation, tolerance, human rights, hope and change.

As with “The Dinner Party,” Chicago decided on a medium generally relegated to the realm of women’s craft--needlework. “Historically, needlework, like women, was put down,” Chicago says. “When I went to art school, needlework was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ A lot of assumptions have been made about what is and what isn’t art. I like to look at those assumptions.”

She also wanted to base the piece on traditional samplers, the needlework squares featuring homespun mottoes that American women have produced for generations. After some research, the group culled 19 proverbs that fit the values they had defined. They were searching for “proverbs that were positive, could be imaged and could allow for a transformation,” explains Chicago, who then worked out the design for the mottoes with the needlework specialists who would execute them.

Take, for example, “Home Sweet Home,” in which an embroidered planet Earth is encircled with homes of all kinds--from an igloo to a thatched hut to a high-rise apartment. The panel, says Chicago, not only illustrates the traditional meaning of the motto, but also reflects “a global consciousness as opposed to a personal consciousness.”

The Skirball exhibition is made up of 18 other stitched pieces and a wood sculpture of a standing figure with outstretched arms and a large embroidered heart on its chest (“Find It in Your Heart”). It also includes Chicago’s preparatory sketches for the works, plus a selection of nine objects she chose from the Skirball’s collection and other sources to further illuminate the use of needlework in traditional Jewish crafts.

To achieve their effects, the “Resolutions” needleworkers used more than a dozen techniques including macrame; cross-stitch and French knot embroidery, and tapestry weaving. Generally, the pairing of phrase and imagery is literal. “A Chicken in Every Pot” (needlework by Helen Eisenberg, Jane Thompson, Mary Ewankoski) shows a Grant Wood-inspired couple, side by side in front of a shack, with two children in tow and, before them, a chicken sticking out of a pot. In “Bury the Hatchet” (needlework by Joyce Gilbert, Thompson and Ewankoski), three religious leaders from different churches join hands to bury the hatchet.

For Chicago, “the simplicity belies the complexity, both in terms of how they’re made and the thought process that went into them.”

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Audrey Cowan, a Los Angeles weaver, has worked with Chicago since “The Dinner Party.” She traveled to New Mexico to join the group that sat around Chicago’s kitchen table during that first meeting for “Resolutions.” She eventually worked on a tapestry panel, “Paddle Your Own Canoe.”

“Everyone who comes into Judy’s projects wants to work with her again,” she says. “I share her vision; that vision is to make the world a better place.” Cowan and other collaborators across the country kept in touch with Chicago by phone and fax, occasionally shipping samples and artwork back and forth. Some even went to New Mexico to finish the pieces in her studio.

“She sent me a sketch,” Cowan recalls. “Then a full-size drawing. She did a color pencil drawing, and that’s what I looked at while I was working.”

The needleworkers had opportunity for input, she says. Chicago’s original design had the adage running across the bottom of the panel. Cowan suggested weaving the words into the image and prevailed. Using the Aubusson technique, “Paddle” is woven with wool and silk threads on a loom. Her piece and another--”Live and Let Live,” a beadwork panel made by Lisa Maue--are the only two works in the show that aren’t combined with Chicago’s painting, as background or sometimes on top of the textile threads.

In a bold narrative style, “Paddle” depicts a black woman about to paddle off in her canoe, a globe perched on its prow, while those on shore--apparently husband, friends, a preacher--are pointing accusingly. “Rarely in my experience have I known a woman who set off to take responsibility for her life or go out and do something important where she didn’t get grief for it,” Chicago notes. “So it’s kind of comical. They’re all going, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding! You shouldn’t be doing that!’ It’s amusing, but it’s not amusing.”

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The Skirball’s decision to exhibit “Resolution” was a natural, according to Nancy Berman, former director of the museum at the Skirball Cultural Center and now its director emeritus and curator at large. Berman first saw the project in slides and illustrations, then went to its debut showing at the American Craft Museum in New York in June.

“It’s amazing how clearly this restates in visual imagery the point of the cultural center,” she says. “One of the interesting and important reasons why this is at the Skirball is that Judy--who happens to be Jewish and had a very secular Jewish upbringing--realized in her studies for the Holocaust Project that she had been brought up imbued with Jewish values.”

However well the exhibition fits the Skirball’s mission, it has had the kind of rocky critical reception Chicago often inspires. At the American Craft Museum, it was blasted by scathing reviews, including one in the New York Times that called it “aesthetically vacuous, conceptually inane and morally disingenuous.”

When asked about such criticisms, Chicago chuckles, “Well, I always get tough reviews in New York--and not just New York either.”

She recalls what artist Billy Al Bengston told her long ago. “ ‘Just don’t pay attention to reviews! Just count the column inches and see how many pictures you get and keep working.’ ” She laughs. “If it weren’t for Billy Al, I would probably have given up. I’ve gotten the worst reviews of any contemporary artist in the world. In fact, if I started getting good reviews, I’d think I was doing something wrong.

“You know how I measure things?” she asks. “I got phone calls from people who had gone to see the show--museum people, friends, people I didn’t know, people I did know--who loved it!”

After all, staying positive and looking forward is her goal. “None of us know what the outcome of our global race to destruction will be,” she muses. “We can just participate in that or step back and say, ‘Can we find a way out of this and if we were to find a way out of this, what would it look like?’ And that’s where art can play a role, because art is about envisioning. ‘Resolutions’ is an effort, sort of a playful effort, to suggest some ways the future might look.”

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Judy Chicago’s Vision

“Resolutions: A Stitch in Time,” Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., L.A. Dates: Jan. 28-April 29. Tuesday-Saturday, noon-5 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission: Adults: $8; seniors and students, $6; members, free. Phone: (310) 440-4500.

Also: “Judy Chicago: An American Vision,” lecture by Edward Lucie-Smith; Q&A; with Chicago; Jan. 29, 7:30 p.m., Skirball Cultural Center. Admission: General: $8; members: $6; students: $6. Phone: (310) 440-4500.

Also: A show of Chicago’s drawings opens at Works on Paper Inc., 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, March 3-April 7.

Also: Judy Chicago interviewed by Barbara Isenberg, March 6, 7 p.m., Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood.

Admission: Free; reservations required. Phone: (310) 440-7300.