NYT T Style February 2018 : Judy Chicago, Dilone & Jenny Shimizu by Collier Schorr

[MissMagAddict]

source | nytimes

 

[MissMagAddict]

The Story Behind T’s Judy Chicago Cover By THESSALY LA FORCE

The inspiration for the cover of T’s women’s issue was a 1970 black-and-white photograph of Judy Chicago sitting in a boxing ring. She wears satin shorts and a sweatshirt printed with her name, a gloved hand on each knee. She looks ready to take a swing.

Often referred to as Judy Chicago’s “boxing ring ad” because the photograph ran in the December 1970 issue of Artforum, the story behind its creation is slightly more complicated. Taken by the photographer Jerry McMillan, the picture was created for a mailer by Chicago’s new dealer at the time, Jack Glenn (he’s the man sitting in the shadows), to promote a solo show of Chicago’s at Cal State Fullerton. Glenn’s gallery had nothing to do with the Fullerton show, but it was located nearby in Orange County, and it made sense for Glenn to promote new representation. The mailer landed on the desk of Artforum’s editor Philip Leider, and it was Leider who suggested that Glenn run it as an advertisement in the magazine. Glenn declined, saying the rate was too expensive — so Leider, who liked the picture, ran it anyway.

Chicago is a pioneering feminist artist whose career has only recently gained the recognition it deserves. Well before she created her most famous work of feminist art, “The Dinner Party” (1979), she was, as Sasha Weiss explains in her profile, “one of the few women to participate in the burgeoning scene around the Ferus Gallery, a locus of West Coast cool whose artists included Edward Kienholz, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses and Ken Price. This storefront on La Cienega Boulevard represented an irreverent hyper-masculinity. (A 1959 photograph showed four Ferus artists draped over a motorcycle.)” Chicago wanted to create a similar looking image that poked fun at the machismo of the male-dominated art world while also placing her squarely within it. “That scene was completely inhospitable to women,” Chicago explained to me after she restaged the boxing ring ad for T. “I was told all the time I couldn’t be an artist and a woman, too.”

The original shoot was fast and loose, an informal production — McMillan said he was the one to come up with the idea to make Chicago a boxer. “We knew Judy well,” he told me, “Judy was a fighter.” Glenn found a gym, paid the owner to let them stage the picture and got some sweatshirts printed with Chicago’s name. Chicago asked someone she barely knew, a friend’s girlfriend, to play the part of her trainer. Women boxers were unheard-of at the time. What she remembers most vividly was that the men training in the gym were startled to see a woman in their midst: “I got a kick out of spoofing the boys.” Things ran late; Chicago had to catch a flight back to Fresno that afternoon. She was itching to get back to her studio. McMillan said he didn’t have much time, but he got the shot.

Even though Artforum’s large readership helped circulate the image of Chicago far and wide, no one quite anticipated the effect it would have on people. “It became a symbol, I guess,” Chicago explains. The photograph was taken just on the cusp of the women artist’s movement. A year later, Linda Nochlin would publish her seminal essay “Why Are There No Women Artists?” in Artnews; four years after that, the Guerrilla Girls would launch their first protest against the lack of inclusion of women artists at MoMA. “I was traveling and lecturing and when I would visit women artists they would have the boxing ring ad up in their studios,” Chicago says. “I’d meet male artists and they’d ask me, ‘Do you want to box?’” Chicago had struck a nerve.

Today, Chicago is proud of the image’s legacy. Her excitement in recreating it for T — now with Collier Schorr behind the camera, and models Dilone and Jenny Shimizu (both champions of diversity in the fashion industry) in the ring — is genuine. This time, she didn’t dress like a boxer and wore her own clothes. She said, “I wanted to send the message that I fought for a place in a male dominated environment and I fought as a woman. I’m a woman. I made a mark as a woman. I wanted to transmit that in how I dressed.” But even so, Chicago remembers the battle, how hard it was to fight for what she deserved. “You have to understand that for a very, very long time, I didn’t fit in,” she says. “I had to be isolated. I told Sasha that there were a lot of times in my career when I didn’t know what to do.” By stepping into the ring once more, Chicago is an example to us all.

source | nytimes

1. Judy Chicago (left) with photographer Collier Schorr on set in New York last December. Credit ©Donald Woodman/ARS New York

2. An outtake from Chicago’s original shoot, which provided the inspiration for T’s cover. Credit Jerry McMillan, ''Judy Chicago with Jack Glenn and Alona Hamilton-Cooke,'' 1970, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2015.M.10), ©Jerry McMillan, courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery

 

[Marc10]

Long live Judy! This is brilliant.

 

[MissMagAddict]

T’s Women’s Fashion Issue: Editor’s Letter By HANYA YANAGIHARA

Here at T, we spend a good deal of time discussing people we admire: fashion designers, artists, writers, architects, chefs and performers of all kinds. Some are notable because they produce works of art that land at the exact right moment in the culture, that seem to not just speak to, but articulate, the global mood. Some are notable because they make art that has proven itself timeless, things or ideas in which every successive generation can find some echo of itself.

As I’ve gotten older, however, the artists I find most mysterious — and therefore compelling — are the prophets, the people who have had to wait for the culture to catch up to them. People like Margaret Atwood, whose novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” while certainly acclaimed upon its publication in 1985, was also dismissed in some quarters as a fevered fantasy — though no longer. Or Kengo Kuma, the Japanese architect who was making buildings that were deliberately humble in both size and material (Kuma prefers to use cedar, a staple of prewar Japanese structures) through decades in which architecture and its critics tended to favor technologically wrought spectacles. Kuma, however, had foreseen a time in which architecture would have to answer, somehow, to the realities of diminishing resources and overstuffed cities, a time when architects would seek not to change the landscape, but integrate themselves into it. (Our story on Kuma will go live on Feb. 15.)

Then there’s our cover star, Judy Chicago, a medium- and genre-defying artist who, at 78, is and will be the subject of a number of major solo gallery and museum shows over the next 18 months. The past year saw her most celebrated work, the monumental (in all senses) “The Dinner Party” (1979) — a vulvic-inspired table with ceramic plates for 39 women from across the centuries, from Sappho to Virginia Woolf — become a pop-cultural touchstone, a visual shorthand for women’s exclusion from the annals of history and a revisionist fantasy: Here, literally, was their place at the table. For Chicago, who has spent almost 40 years watching her creation be, alternately, reviled, praised, sneered at, ignored and celebrated, the work’s triumph is a relief. From its conception, she told writer Sasha Weiss, she knew “it needed to be permanently housed, because if it hadn’t been, it would have simply reiterated the story of erasure it recounts.” The work now has a permanent home — physically, and in the annals of art and feminism — at the Brooklyn Museum. Still, Chicago admits, “I had no idea it was going to take this long” — words that resonate for many of us, in many ways.

If you are an artist, there is nothing sweeter than having your art be seen, discussed, debated and, ultimately, appreciated. One could argue that it doesn’t matter when that appreciation comes — for most artists, it never arrives at all. And yet being a cultural Cassandra, being possessed of what Weiss characterizes as Chicago’s “lonely clairvoyance,” is a difficult and often isolating role. Getting to say “I told you so” is little reward for what can be decades of ignominy, if not outright ridicule. Playing outside the club — and in the art world, being female or a person of color has more or less guaranteed you’ll probably be far outside — requires a special kind of determination, powered by one’s strength of conviction and singular vision, as well as the rare gift (sometimes natural, sometimes borne from necessity) not to seek or crave validation … or, at least, to convince yourself you won’t and don’t.

One of Chicago’s own struggles was redefining what art should look like. And for all the challenges of our current era, we are collectively lucky to live in an age in which those definitions (and those dictating what an artist looks like, for that matter) are changing. Not fast enough, perhaps, not soon enough — I had no idea it was going to take this long — but changing nonetheless. The same can be said of beauty, generally. This issue is a celebration of all the different ways beauty is expressed and manifested, and all the different faces it wears. That redefinition begins with our cover, which, along with Chicago, features two other beautiful people: the Dominican-American model Dilone, whom I love for her coltish, spunky grace; and the model I came into adulthood admiring, Jenny Shimizu. If you are an Asian-American of a certain age, then the Japanese-American Shimizu’s arrival on the scene — via a now-iconic 1994 CK One ad — was a jolt, and a promise. What we didn’t know was that it would be an unacceptable number of years until we’d once again see an Asian face in a major ad campaign. As image-makers, our job is to make sure that with every month, our definition of beauty gets a little more expansive. Because no one who’s had to fight so hard for a seat at the table should ever feel they might lose it by just standing up.

source | nytimes

 

[Royal-Galliano]

omg i love that chart below, thank you for posting, MMA!

more popeye in my life, YES!

 

[Bertrando3]

Ohhh so cool to see Jenny Shimizu on a cover again !!!

 

[ellastica]

Somehow the most heinous modern day magazine logo was left untouched.

T magazine's redesign graph nicely sums up the "trending" design topics on Pinterest over the past 6 years (not to mention the same exact concepts circulating in print magazines).

I much preferred the unexpected mysteries of creative inspiration back before the world was on social media. Nowadays it's the same old sh*t, delivered in the same old tired way or appallingly unaltered nor adapted.

So much for insight driven re-design.

 

[MissMagAddict]

I much preferred the unexpected mysteries of creative inspiration back before the world was on social media. Nowadays it's the same old sh*t, delivered in the same old tired way or appallingly unaltered nor adapted.

A never ending white wall of noise.
Deafening.