Viki D. Thompson-Wylder

The Birth Project [1]— Judy Chicago’s analysis of the interrelationships among gender, femaleness, maternity and motherhood — was thirty years ahead of its time. Chicago was the first to comprehensively address the issues found within the series. Completed between 1980 and 1985, these images afford a vision seldom seen in western culture since the Neolithic, when woman embodied Creation itself as well as the many manifestations of individual creation: human, plant, animal and mineral. Chicago wanted to reveal birth as spiritual and intellectual, a source of potent myth and symbol. She also wanted to show the reality and physicality of the birth experience. Historically, nearly all western images of mother and child were idealized or sentimentalized. In the early years of this century, several exhibitions raised more complex themes about motherhood – for example, the ambivalence women may feel about taking on the responsibility of another human life. Chicago’s own complex visual exploration of maternal cognitive dissonance within the Birth Project precedes these exhibitions by nearly twenty years.

Renewed interest in the maternal body makes this exhibition timely. A number of recent political and scientific developments re-emphasize women’s bodies as commodities. In contrast, all Chicago’s bodies are empowered, and her images encourage viewers to perceive women in unaccustomed ways. Illustrative of this is the woman depicted in The Crowning, who is inter-sexed as well as interspecific. Chicago offers women a changed self-norm.

The Birth Project was stitched by 150 women needle workers who joined Chicago over the five-year period of its production to complete approximately 84 textiles for a series of “exhibition units.” Chicago worked with needle workers, providing under paintings, cartoons, drawings, mock-ups, color specifications and written directions for the transformation of her images. One needle worker summarized the process: “We are creating within Judy’s creation.” [2] Every needle worker receives public credit for her work.

The medium of textiles, quilting and embroidery, associated with craft since the Renaissance, was returned by Chicago to its medieval standing as an art medium. Chicago’s ability to transform the “discriminated-against” status of textile and needle media encouraged the use of such media by other artists. Like The Dinner Party, Chicago’s execution of the Birth Project helped redefine terms like “art” and “craft.”

For Chicago, focus on skill determined the work as craft, while focus on meaning determined the work as art. The meaning of the Birth Project was, and continues to be, revolutionary.

This exhibition reassembles a number of exceptional Birth Project works. Originally, the Birth Project was divided into groups of pieces and shown simultaneously as exhibition units in galleries, museums, libraries and hospitals throughout the United States. The accompanying documentary book, which is now out of print, provides the only overview of the Birth Project. Among past schools of feminist thought were those that perceived an emphasis on sexual difference as a basis for criticism of the imagery explored in the Birth Project. Feminist historian Jane Gerhard, however, hails sexual difference as “possibly the only starting point for understanding” the next phase of the women’s “revolution.” [3] The Birth Project was designed by Chicago, and is now “born again” in this exhibition, a continuing force for cultural change and aesthetic transformation.

[1] The book published in 1985 to accompany the original exhibitions of Birth Project work provided much of the information for this essay as well as the commentary for each work in this show: Judy Chicago, The Birth Project (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985)

[2] Chicago, Birth Project, 164.

[3] Jane F. Gerhard, The Dinner Party, Judy Chicago and the Power of Popular Feminism, 1970-2007 (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2013), 287.