The feminist artist who rocked a rabbi’s world

Rabbi Mark Goldsmith is so keen on artist Judy Chicago he drops her into his services. “I first became aware of Judy Chicago through a passage in her writings, The Merger Poem. Written in 1979, it was often used in creative Jewish services, in place of or alongside the al keyn n’kaveh prayer. It is now in our 2008 Reform Judaism Siddur and this is an extract:

Researching the prayer’s author, I discovered Judy Chicago, the extraordinarily accomplished American feminist artist, who was born Judy Cohen in Chicago, 1939. She changed her last name to her hometown in 1970 to free herself from living under the name of her male forebears and, in that year, also founded the first Feminist Art Programme at Fresno’s California State University.

From now until 1 September, Hyde Park’s Serpentine North Gallery is exhibiting a comprehensive, stimulating and fascinating retrospective  of Judy Chicago’s six decades of art. Were it not an entirely inappropriate term, this free-to-enter exhibition, titled Revelations, would be called a ‘masterclass’, such is the scope of feminist art.

I have grown up with strong female role models, who have taught me that we live culturally with a great deficit of women’s art, literature and creativity because male-dominated structures tend to fail to foster and indeed erase women’s work. Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah and Rabbi Marcia Plumb, with collaborators, helped to educate our community about this loss when they organised the Half-Empty Bookcase conference in the early 1990s and a great part of our work when creating the new Reform Judaism Machzor for the High Holy Days was to ensure it was suffused with women’s voices as least as much as men’s.

Judy Chicago’s exhibition helps us to learn the same lessons through art. Her most famous piece The Dinner Party was created from 1974-1979 with 400 participants who made elaborate place settings for prominent women through history, along with recording the names of 999 women who have made a difference to the world.

It is now permanently displayed in Brooklyn but at the Serpentine, Judy narrates a film on its making with many sketches and interviews chronicling its development. She says that it is as if Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper were made by the people who have done the cooking throughout history.

After The Dinner Party we move to her Atmosphere installations and then her PowerPlay series, a striking commentary on the destruction of nature and violence against women and the earth. These pieces certainly gave me, as a man, pause for thought as to our patterns of behaviour. The final chapter is the Birth Project framed as a revelation, much as the early chapters of Genesis in the Torah are a narrative of the formation of the universe.

Revelations ends with a 2022 piece in which Judy encourages collaboration in a booth where you can record your answer to the question: ‘What if women ruled the world?’

This exhibition is a must-see for anyone wanting to rethink art from a feminist perspective, just as Judy’s Merger Poem is a manifesto that sets out a repaired world that would be wonderful to live in. The Revelation is that tikkun olam (the repair of the world) is possible.

Revelations runs at Serpentine North until 1 September 2024.           Mark Goldsmith is Senior Rabbi at Edgware and Hendon Reform Synagogue and chair of the MRJ Machzor Editorial Committee