She’s spent half a century fighting male ‘arrogance’ in the art world. Now 80, the spray gun-wielding American’s latest work is a howl of rage at what we’re doing to the planet
Eighty this year, Judy Chicago’s hair is white and violet, and she’s wearing lipstick so plum-dark it registers as black. It’s a strident image that suggests she’s a fighter, which she is: funny and forthright, she has dedicated a career to courageous exploration of difficult subjects, from catastrophic injury to mental illness. Some things, though, can’t be fought: extreme weather has left her grounded in New Mexico, thousands of miles from Gateshead where a retrospective of half a century of her work opened earlier this month. I end up talking to her on a video call.
This intervention of natural forces is grimly apposite. Chicago’s show at the Baltic focuses on extinction narratives and human responsibilities to the planet. She has spent the past three years contemplating mortality. The series The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction turns from Chicago’s feelings about her own death to grief over what we are doing to our environment. “There’s not a lot we can do about the fact that we’re going to die, is there?” she says. “We can’t do anything about our own mortality, but we can definitely do something about what we’re doing to the other creatures on the planet, and [to] the Earth.”
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