(Note: Download a high resolution photo of Judy Chicago.)
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – The intent behind the mysterious buzz of activity in the Cohen Building at Vanderbilt University will become clearer on March 2, with a lecture at Sarratt Cinema on the work of Judy Chicago and Donald Woodman.
Vivien Green Fryd, a Vanderbilt professor of art history who is conducting a seminar in conjunction with Chicago and Woodman’s Multimedia Project of Discovery, will lecture on the work of these two acclaimed artists who are Vanderbilt’s first Chancellor’s Artists-in-Residence. Chicago and Woodman are leading 12 Vanderbilt students and 13 artists from the Nashville community in a semester-long project that will culminate with the April 21 opening of an exhibition at the Cohen Building, on the Peabody College campus of Vanderbilt. The exhibition will be open through May 13.
The lecture will be from 6:30 to 8 p.m. March 2 in Sarratt and is titled “Intersecting Lives: Judy Chicago and Donald Woodman, in Collaboration.” A reception will precede the lecture at 5:30 p.m., and Woodman and Chicago will answer questions from the audience afterward. The lecture and reception are free and open to the public. Sarratt Cinema is in the Sarratt Student Center on the Vanderbilt campus at 2301 Vanderbilt Place.
“The lecture will focus especially on a project on the Holocaust they did together, and also the At Home Project at Western Kentucky University in 2001 that has much in common with what’s happening now at Vanderbilt,” Fryd said.
Participants in the Multimedia Project of Discovery include a weaver, a hip-hop artist and a classical music composer. They range from 18 to 60 years old and their backgrounds take in a wide variety of world cultures, including Japan, India and the United States.
The project recently took on an added dimension with the addition of a team of documentary filmmakers from Vanderbilt’s Film Studies Program, who are filming the entire process. Plans call for the documentary to premiere at the April 21 opening and run through the end of the exhibition.
Chicago is a world-renowned artist whose career spans four decades. Her major works include The Dinner Party, a symbolic history of women in western civilization. The multimedia work was created from 1974 to 1979 with the aid of hundreds of volunteers and will be permanently housed starting in 2007 at the Brooklyn Museum as part of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The Dinner Party has been viewed by more than a million people at 16 exhibitions in six countries. Chicago has published 10 books and her art and writing have been highly influential.
Chicago is also a pioneering educator. She developed an influential feminist art education program at California State University, Fresno, in the early 1970s and continued to develop her pedagogical method at universities around the country including Indiana University Bloomington and Duke University.
Woodman is an acclaimed commercial and fine art photographer and teacher whose work has been published in Vanity Fair, Art in America, Newsweek and many other national magazines and has exhibited internationally. His photographs are included in the Polaroid Collection, The Museum of New Mexico, New Orleans Museum of Art as well as other public and private collections. Woodman does location and studio photography in all camera formats, and he specializes in large format and digital photography for architectural, fine art, catalogue and product photography.
Together, Woodman and Chicago created The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light, a 3,000-square-foot exhibition combining painting and photography that debuted in 1993 at the Spertus Museum in Chicago and traveled to museums around the country.
Media contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu