From Content to Form: Judy Chicago's Pedagogy with Reflections by Judy Chicago

Abstract

In this article, internationally renowned artist and educator Judy Chicago reflects on her teaching and on my own interpretation of her pedagogy in three projects: Womanhouse (1971–1972), At Home (2001–2002), and Envisioning the Future (2003–2004). From a comparison of pre- and post-open-ended questionnaire responses given by 62 participants in the Envisioning the Future (ETF) project, I identified aspects of Chicago's methodology that make it unique from other studio teaching approaches. Gender, status, and ideology emerge as significant themes in the analysis of eight artist-educators' experiences who learn Chicago's teaching methodology in a 10-day workshop and subsequently are guided by Chicago in their semester-long facilitation of artmaking groups of the 62 participants in the ETF project. I distinguish Chicago's teaching methodology from common threads of feminist pedagogy. These threads include the following goals: effecting social change; envisioning teaching as a political act; viewing knowledge as value-laden; valuing personal experience and self-representation; providing avenues for multivocality, and sharing leadership in student-centered environments. The focus is on Chicago's primary teaching goal, which is to facilitate the creation of “content-based art of high quality.”