A Contemporary Repository Judy Chicago's Kitty City: A Feline Book of Hours

Abstract

During the course of her career Judy Chicago created ground-breaking artworks like the Dinner Party (1974-1979) and the Holocaust Project (1985-1993) to communicate social concerns. In her latest venture, Kitty City: A Feline Book of Hours (2005), she extends her feminist principles to western culture’s attitude toward animals. Here she utilizes a more modestly-sized, and generally more playful, concept than in those previous works. Nevertheless with seriousness of purpose she adapts a historic form known to have been created and used by women, the medieval Book of Hours. In so doing, Chicago creates a repository which holds and points to the numerous women’s issues that have come to define her oeuvre. Specifically Kitty City points to a reclamation of the history of women and their art production, more particularly that of the Middle Ages. It points to feminist aesthetic issues and debates centering on concepts like expansion of the boundaries of art, collaboration, the artwork’s connection to feminist principles or ideals, and the valuation or non-valuation of women’s chosen subject matter. It points to a feminist theological critique of patriarchal Judeo-Christian hierarchical power relationships as well as the converse empowerment of “all who share this planet.”