Welcome to the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection!
The Judy Chicago Art Education Collection is a living archive on feminist art education. The Collection lives from continued scholarship and teaching in counterbalance to ongoing tendencies of erasure of feminist histories and feminist pedagogy. The participatory architecture of the Collection website invites the voices of many to develop a feminist art education generative archive. A good way to get started is to first visit the online archive at http://judychicago.arted.psu.edu/. Below are descriptions of the online and onsite archive of the Judy Chicago Collection at Penn State.
At the top of each page is the menu with pull-down submenus for the following areas: Home, About, Award, Feminist, Living, Archives, Finding, Media, Suite, Dialogue, and Contact.
At the bottom of each page is a login link. Login enables you to download documents from the site, and is required for using the forum or to comment on materials in the Collection posted on the site. We refer to the comments to metatag the materials so that when you do a search you can find archived materials based on search terms you use.
Also, at the bottom of each page there is a link to the Collection’s Facebook site, and quick links on how to visit the physical archive at Penn State and to related sites: Judy Chicago, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Through the Flower, Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. What follows is an annotated site map.
Annotated Site Map
- Home is a good way to see at a glance a timeline with title of project and location of each of Judy Chicago’s 11 teaching projects. The Home page also features three main entry points with:
(1) A link to check out the latest news and events, and a link to learn what people are talking about The Judy Chicago Art Education Collection on the Forum and to participate in the dialogue.
(2) A link to explore The Dinner Party Curriculum Project and Participatory Art Pedagogy on the site and to download curriculum resources.
(3) A link to check out what is inside the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection @ Penn State.
- About provides an overview of the The Judy Chicago Art Education Collection @ Penn State and A Lasting Legacy image on this page links to a two-minute film of Judy Chicago discussing the need for feminist histories, art, and archives.
- Award includes a link to a video of Judy Chicago announcing the Judy Chicago Art Education award, and information about the award and application, including a link for submissions.
- “Feminist” is a hub to find feminist art education materials beyond the Collection. Here are links to interviews with Judy Chicago, The Feminist Art Project, publications about Judy Chicago, and much more.
- Living Curricula comprises four generative projects:
- The Dinner Party Curriculum Project includes curricular ideas for k-12 teachers on how to facilitate encounters with Judy Chicago’s monumental artwork, The Dinner Party.
- Participatory Art Pedagogy is a multi-media overview of Judy Chicago’s feminist art teaching methodology.
- Out of Here is a site of the Penn State graduate course on Judy Chicago’s feminist art teaching methodology.
- Teaching with the Collection includes award-winning curriculum that teaches about and from The Dinner Party. At the From the Field section you are invited to share feminist art education curricula to build an archive and to comment with narratives of feminist art pedagogy.
- Teaching Conversations is a project of a group of feminist colleagues at Penn State who embrace feminist principles of equity and eco-social justice, and set into motion participatory, self-knowledge, and critical inquiry.
- Gallery Conversations includes podcasts and Twitter feeds of Feminist Art Gallery Conversations from the Palmer Museum of Art’s Spring 2014 exhibition, Surveying Judy Chicago: Five Decades.
- Film Series links to a set of films shown weekly during the spring 2014 semester selected for discussion on feminist art pedagogy.
- Archives is the section on what is included in the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection and how to access the materials.
- Onsite Archive introduces what is in the archive with the Finding Aid and provides guidance on to search, identify, request, visit, and study the archives physically housed at Penn State’s Special Collections at the Paterno Library at University Park, Pennsylvania.
- Teaching Projects is the gateway to digitized materials from each of Judy Chicago’s 11 teaching projects from 1970 to 2005.
- The section Publications about Judy Chicago @ Penn State lists the Judy Chicago resources available in the Penn State Libraries, including books, videos, and articles.
- Online Collection is where to find the first digital publication of The Dinner Party Curriculum Project and Judy Chicago’s Participatory Art Pedagogy.
- Find takes you to the Finding Aid, which is the document that you and the archivist will use when you visit the archive. To begin identify the focus of your inquiry (e.g., Jewish identity, Holocaust, miscegenation, performance art, content-based art critiques) as this will help you and archivists to identify which boxes for you to explore. There is a general description of the items, but each box contains many items not listed in the general description. This is part of the fun and excitement of archival research; you never know what interesting item you may come across when looking through the boxes requested.
- Media is the Judy Chicago Channel with links to digitized videos on Judy Chicago in the Collection and Penn State Libraries.
- Resource Suite is in the Arts Cottage at the University Park campus of Penn State, which is a place to meet, study, and organize.
- Hours & Location provides the semester schedule of open hours.
- Resources at the Judy Chicago Resource Suite lists the artworks, books, journals, and other materials available for study in the suite of rooms including the Judy Chicago office.
- Meeting is a calendar of events in the Resource Suite.
- Teatime Conversations are open drop-in conversations at the Resource Suite with reflections on discussions in 2014-15.
- Enter the Dialogue Portal to dialogue with Judy Chicago about studio art education by responding to the six questions in each of the four sections of the Dialogue Portal. Introduce yourself in relation to art education (e.g., student, teacher, artist) and share your perspectives in relation to others’ posts.
- Contact provides email, phone, address, and map to contact an archivist and visit the archives, as well as contact on who ask questions regarding Judy Chicago’s art pedagogy, research and teaching involving the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection, and The Dinner Party Curriculum Project.
The 14 Encounters with “The Dinner Party,” an art installation by Judy Chicago at the Brooklyn Museum, include discussion prompts and art activities to learn about the monumental art work.
K-12 art teachers pursuing an online Master of Professional Studies in Art Education tried the DPCP Encounter #1 titled “Table Talk” at https://judychicago.arted.psu.edu/14-encounters/encounter-i/. The Encounter activities and prompts generated new insights from sharing drawings and photos of a table and responding to questions such as:
“What does it mean to have a place at the table?”
One art teacher responded: “I found Chicago’s exhibition to bring a new way of looking at the table. There were elements within her work that I didn’t originally connect with the idea of a table. The concept of the tables being arranged in an equilateral triangle to explain the equality in society that women are consistently chasing or working for, for one example.”
All the Encounters are designed for teaching about contemporary art in K-12 art classes. See more at https://judychicago.arted.psu.edu/dpcp/
A video of Judy Chicago’s 2014 lecture “Institutional Time: A Critique of Studio Art Education” based on her teaching residencies at universities and from discussions with students and teachers. I draw your attention to a segment of her talk (see https://judychicago.arted.psu.edu/dialogue/invitation/ time clip: 18:18 to 20:36), in which she addresses the work of a particular student and models how to facilitate conversation about student work.
This is a need identified in “Addressing Contemporary Social Issues in Art Education: A Survey of Public School Art Educators in Georgia” (Milbrandt, 2002, Studies in Art Education, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 141-157) in which art teachers asked for preservice and inservice workshops on how to facilitate dialogue with students to help them communicate issues important to them in their art. Judy Chicago states: “The most potent aspect of my methodology proved to be its insistence that every voice is important, a practice that unfortunately is in direct contrast to what goes on in most…studio-art programs where students (without regard for their personal experiences, interests, or inclinations) are exposed to the latest, hottest trends in art and expected to fit themselves into a system that eats up and disposes of young artists almost as quickly as animal innards in the brutal system of factory farming” (from https://judychicago.arted.psu.edu/dpcp/).
Excerpts from Judy Chicago’s teaching (1971-2005) can be seen in the video, “Challenge Yourself: Judy Chicago’s Studio Art Pedagogy,” which is, also, at the first part of four areas (intro, teaching, inclusion, and transforming curriculum) in the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection Dialogue Portal at https://judychicago.arted.psu.edu/dialogue/invitation/
Judy Chicago’s teaching methodology that Chicago refers to as “Participatory Art Pedagogy Informed by Feminist Principles” is a supportive, inclusionary practice that guides students how to translate personal experience into content-based visual form that informs and engages a larger audience than oneself in that particular content.
Judy Chicago in an interview with Karen Keifer-Boyd in 2002 describes: “It’s a model where the teacher helps to first make each student feel valued. By listening to what the students have to say, communicates the fact that what the students have to say is important. And that their experience is worthy of examination. And next, that in their experience is potential content for artmaking, which also makes their experience important. If you can turn your experience into artmaking, then it validates your experience. It really is a very simple process, but sometimes implementing the process is not so simple. It has to do with going around in a circle, giving everybody a time and space.”
(See https://judychicago.arted.psu.edu/participatory-art…/4/)
Another online resource in the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection is a podcast of Wanda Knight’s 2014 gallery conversation ““Mirror, mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Finest of Them All?: D(EVALUATION) of Black Female Beauty,” which begins with a performance of Carrie Mae Weems’ art, “Mirror Mirror” (1987, gelatin silver print). In Knight’s conversation about Chicago’s art “Earth Birth” (1983, sprayed Versatex and floss on fabric), she emphasized the need to develop knowledge of self—your beliefs, assumptions, and biases. Look in the mirror at yourself, rather than out the window at others. She posits: “Arguably, Black women, are the mothers of all civilization. We are all African descendants.” Listen at at https://judychicago.arted.psu.edu/audio/021414-Knight.MP3 as resource for k-12 art curriculum.