NoCal | Curator Guided Tour of ‘Judy Chicago: A Retrospective’ at the de Young Museum

Join Claudia Schmuckli, Curator-in-Charge of Contemporary Art and Programming at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, for a guided tour of the Judy Chicago: A Retrospective exhibition at the de Young Museum. Meet up with your fellow NoCal members at the entrance to the exhibition on October 14th at 11am. Following the tour, enjoy a no-host lunch with Schmuckli at the de Young Café.

This program is $5 and open to ArtTable members only. Members may bring a guest for an additional $10. Please note that museum admission and lunch are not included.

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Please read before registering:

Covid-19 Guidelines:

In accordance with an order from the San Francisco Department of Public Health, all individuals regardless of vaccination status must wear a mask while inside the de Young museum. Proof of vaccination is not required for regular museum visits to the de Young., but is a requirement to attend some onsite events.

The museum continues to have safety measures in place to ensure a safe and healthy environment for visitors and staff. The measures include frequent cleaning of high-touch areas, sanitizing stations, and Plexiglass shields at the Tickets and Membership Desks.

*The museums reserve the right to deny entry, refuse service to, or revoke the admission of any visitor who does not comply with safety guidelines.

If you are showing COVID-19 symptoms, please stay home. This is critical to the health and safety of museum staff and communities.

Accessibility:

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are committed to offering services that make its collections, exhibitions, and programs accessible to all visitors. Programs and visiting options for individuals with disabilities as well as other underserved populations in the community are crucial for creating equity in access to the arts. Please click here to read more about accessibility options at the de Young Museum, and email programs@arttable.org if you need assistance in setting up accommodations for this program.

Getting There:

John F. Kennedy Drive is currently closed to vehicular traffic from Kezar Drive to Transverse Drive. Paid parking is available in the Music Concourse garage; access from the Fulton Street and 10th Avenue entrance. A limited number of accessible parking spots are available in the garage. For information on public transportation, please visit the SFMTA website. Cars have the ability to drop off visitors in front of the de Young using Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr. This is accessible via the intersection of MLK and Music Concourse drive.

About Claudia Schmuckli

Claudia Schmuckli is the inaugural Curator-in-Charge of Contemporary Art and Programming at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Since joining in the fall of 2016, she has developed a dynamic program of exhibitions, commissions, and acquisitions that dialogue with the institution’s sites, buildings, and collections in view of a self-critical reassessment of the Museums’ histories and identities.

Currently on view at the Fine Arts Museums are her most recent exhibitions Wangechi Mutu: I am Speaking, Are You Listening? at the Legion of Honor and Judy Chicago: A Retrospective, at the de Young. Prior to these presentations, Schmuckli curated Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI, the first major museum exhibition in the United States to reflect on the political and philosophical stakes of artificial intelligence and Specters of Disruption, an exhibition drawn from the Museums’ Collections, which connected the geological and colonial underpinnings of the de Young Museum to the current conditions in Northern California. Other projects include interventions at the Legion of Honor by Alexandre Singh, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sarah Lucas, and Urs Fischer, as well as projects by Lisa Reihana, Leonardo Drew, Ranu Mukherjee, Matt Mullican, and DIS at the de Young.

Previously, Schmuckli was the director and chief curator of the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, where she organized over thirty exhibitions including solo shows dedicated to The Propeller Group, Matthew Ronay, Analia Saban, Slavs and Tatars, Candice Breitz, Tony Feher, Johan Grimonprez, Gabriel Kuri, Chantal Akerman, and Amy Sillman, among many others. Schmuckli began her career in New York as a curatorial assistant at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art. She is a Swiss citizen and holds an MA degree in art history from the Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany.

About the exhibition

Pioneering feminist artist Judy Chicago’s retrospective spans her early engagement with the Californian Light and Space Movement in the 1960s to her current body of work, a searing investigation of mortality and environmental devastation, begun in 2015. The exhibition includes approximately 130 paintings, prints, drawings, and ceramic sculptures, in addition to ephemera, several films, and a documentary. Together, these works of art chart the boundary-pushing path of the artist named Cohen by birth and Gerowitz by marriage, who, after trying to fit into the patriarchal structure of the Los Angeles art world, decided to change her name and the course of history.

Organized on the heels of the 40th anniversary of Chicago’s landmark installation, The Dinner Party, in San Francisco and opening in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of women’s right to vote across the United States, Judy Chicago: A Retrospective pays homage to an artist whose lifelong fight against the suppression and erasure of women’s creativity has finally come full circle.

Thank you to Dorothy Dávila, ArtTable Board Member, for organizing this program, and to Claudia Schmuckli for her time and expertise.

Images:

1. The de Young Museum, courtesy of hisour.com.