Judy Chicago Bigamy Hood, 1965/2011 Sprayed automotive lacquer on car hood 43 x 43 x 4 1/8 in. © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photo © Donald Woodman/ARS, NY Courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

Legendary Feminist Artist Judy Chicago Designed a T-Shirt for Max Mara

Surprisingly, there are no sex organs involved.

There’s no artist whose work is more heartily associated with second wave feminism than Judy Chicago. Her 1979 work of art ‘The Dinner Party’ – a series of ornately decorated plates resembling pudendas meant to remedy the omission of important women from history – is considered one of the first pieces of explicitly feminist art and is now housed permanently at the Brooklyn Museum.

A new retrospective exhibition of Chicago’s work, Judy Chicago: A Reckoning, opening at Art Basel, surveys the artist’s multi-dimensional practice including lesser seen works from her early career as well as a new site-specific work conceived as a critique of male architects’ macho tendency to destroy nature. The work, called A Purple Poem for Miami, will debut on February 23rd, 2019.

To commemorate this momentous occasion, Chicago has teamed up with Max Mara to create a bold graphic t-shirt featuring the artist’s signature bold, psychedelic imagery rendered in Max Mara’s muted colour palette. The abstract graphics hints at two severed halves of a broken heart, or perhaps two figures immersed in intellectual debate.

Like much of Chicago’s work, it is both soft and intellectual, yet unapologetically feminine. The artist herself characterized the collaboration as “an exciting challenge, one that required a considerable amount of time, creativity, and many drawings.”

Max Mara’s creative director, Ian Griffiths, hopes the collaboration will reinforce the brand’s commitment to empowering women.

 

 

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