Feminist Art as part of Calgary's First Thursdays

Calgary's monthly culture-crawl, First Thursdays, is tomorrow night and one of the features is this exhibit of superb feminist art and it's super affordable! Check out the details c/o www.firstthursdays.ca :

If Women Ruled the World

Venue / Location:
The Art Gallery of Calgary (117-8th Ave SW)
Repeats every day every Tuesday and every Wednesday and every Thursday and every Friday and every Saturday until Sat Jan 23 2010 .25 Sep 2009 (All day)

Ticket Price: $2.50-$5
LiveRush Price:$2
Event Description:
If Women Ruled the World: Judy Chicago in ThreadA Co-production between the Textile Museum of Canada (Toronto) and The Art Gallery of CalgaryArtists: Judy ChicagoMedium: Mixed MediaGallery: Main, Tall, Top North and South


Living legend of feminist art, Judy Chicago’s place on the landscape of contemporary textile practice is a significant one. Best known for her groundbreaking sculptural installation, The Dinner Party (1974-76), Chicago has spent decades exploring the possibilities of “thread as brushstroke”. The exhibition surveys some of Chicago’s most important contributions in cloth, highlighting both key and lesser-known works dating from 1971 to present. From macramé to needle point to airbrushed quilts, Chicago employs “technique as content” in her major projects selected for this survey exhibition including, The Birth Project (1980-1985), The Holocaust Project (1993), and Resolutions: A Stitch in Time (1994 to present). This exhibition centralizes the labour intensive nature of Chicago’s textile work as a metaphor for investing in the ideas, values, histories and provocation in her artwork. This unmistakable work of the hand draws attention to the possibilities of making as an explicitly political act. To this end, five artists who take this notion to heart are profiles alongside Chicago, underscoring her ongoing and unmistakable influence and creating an intergenerational dialogue with Chicago’s most recent work If Women Ruled the World (2008).

Allyson Mitchell is an artist and academic concerned with the intersections of feminist art, education, activism and theory. Working predominantly in textile-based sculpture, installation and film, Mitchell has exhibited her work in galleries and festivals across Canada, the US, Europe and East Asia. Her show, Lady Sasquatch, will be touring across Canada in 2009-2010. Allyson Mitchell has performed extensively with “Pretty Porky and Pissed Off”, a fat performance troupe, as well as publishing both writing and music. She recently completed her PhD in Women’s Studies at York University, where she teaches feminist cultural theory. When Women Rule the World: Judy Chicago and Cloth is her first major curatorial project.

She Will Always Be Younger Than UsArtists: Orly Cogan, Gillian Strong, Wednesday Lupypciw, Cat Mazza and Ginger Brooks Takahashi
She Will Always Be Younger Than Us brings together a selection of artists whose work counts among its influences the practice of Judy Chicago. Orly Cogan, Wednesday Lupypciw, Cat Mazza, Gillian Strong and Ginger Brooks Takahashi are young artists whose work is explicitly engaged with feminist politics through the use of textile, thread and fibre. Their work ranges from video to embroidery, performance and sculpture with the political intention to ignite politics and question culture.