Early Personal Life
Judy Chicago was born Judith Sylvia Cohen in 1939, to Arthur and May Cohen, in Chicago, Illinois. Her father came from a twenty-three generation lineage of rabbis, including Vilna Gaon. Unlike his family predecessors, he would become a labor organizer and a Marxist. Arthur worked nights at a post office and during the day he would take care of Chicago, while May, who was a former dancer, worked as a medical secretary. Arthur's active participation in the American Communist Party, liberal views towards women and support of worker's rights, strongly influenced Chicago's way of thinking and belief system. During the 1950s McCarthyism era, he was investigated, which caused him to struggle to find work, and caused the family much turmoil. In 1945, while home alone with her infant brother, Ben, an FBI agent visited the home. The agent began to ask the six year old Chicago questions about her father and his friends, but the agent was interrupted upon the return of May to the house. Arthur's health declined, and he died in 1953 from peritonitis. May would not discuss his death with Chicago and Ben, and did not allow the children to attend the funeral. Chicago would not reflect on his death until she was an adult, and in the early 1960s she would be hospitalized for almost a month with a bleeding ulcer attributed to unresolved grief.
May loved the arts, and instilled her passion for them in her children, as evident in Chicago's future as an artist, and brother Ben's eventual career as a potter. At age of three, Chicago began to draw and was sent to the Art Institute of Chicago to attend classes. By the age of 5, Chicago knew that she "never wanted to do anything but make art." She applied, but was declined attendance at the Art Institute, and attended UCLA on a scholarship.
Read more about this topic: Judy Chicago
Famous quotes containing the words early, personal and/or life:
“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“Here lies the body of William Jones
Who all his life collected bones,
Till Death, that grim and boney spectre,
That universal bone collector,
Boned old Jones, so neat and tidy,
And here he lies, all bona fide.”
—Anonymous. “Epitaph on William Jones,” from Eleanor Broughton’s Varia (1925)