Judy Chicago Quotations

You shouldn't have to justify your work.

I set my sights upon becoming the kind of artist who would make a contribution to art history

Donald, my husband, considers himself a feminist.

With my early work I got eviscerated by my male professors, and so you learned to disguise your impulses, as many women have done. And thats definitely changed.

Ah, well, do I wish that we lived in a world where gender didn't figure so prominently? Of course. Do I even think about myself as a woman when I go to make art? Of course not.

I go to make art as who I am as a person. The fact that I am a woman comes into play maybe in the kinds of things I'm interested in or in the way I structure a canvas.

I feel like I have at least begun to make a contribution, but my most significant concern has to do with whether my actual art will be preserved for future generations or be erased.

There's no question that many more women artists are showing worldwide now than they were when I was a young woman, and that's really great.

It's not enough to have a few women's studies courses. Why is it more important to study Paul Revere's midnight ride than it is Susan B. Anthony's 50-year effort to transform the face of America for women? When you're in school, most of the events you study are about men. Men's activities lauded and repeated over and over. What about us? What about commemorating the decades-long struggle for suffrage? Why don't we hear those stories over and over and over again. It's almost inconceivable for men to understand what it would be like to live without that constant valorization.

So women are at the beginning of building a language, and not all women are conscious of it.