• A Tribute to Toronto _DSC3735
  • A Tribute to Toronto DSC04181
  • A Tribute to Toronto DSC04505

Judy Chicago

A Tribute to Toronto: Triptych

Archival Inkjet Print on Fine Art Rag
75 plus 10 APs, 4 PPs
2022
Each on 20 x 24 inch paper
Tribute to Toronto (Blue) is a 12 x 20 inch print image on a 20 x 24 inch paper
Tribute to Toronto (Green) is a 14 x 20 inch print image on a 20 x 24 inch paper
Tribute to Toronto (Purple) is a 14 x 20 inch print image on a 20 x 24 inch paper

$7,500.00

In stock

Category: Tag:

About Artwork

PURCHASE THIS TRIPTYCH TO SUPPORT THE TORONTO BIENNIAL OF ART AND RECEIVE A DISCOUNT

Judy Chicago first turned to pyrotechnics as an artistic material in the late 1960s in an effort to feminize the atmosphere at a time when the California art scene was male-dominated. Between 1968 and 1974, she executed a series of increasingly complex firework pieces that involved site-specific performances around California. Judy began to create more ambitious projects that transformed beaches, parks, forests, deserts, construction sites, and museums with whirling plumes of brilliant colour that were organized according to the principles she developed that use colour as a metaphor for emotive states. Judy’s experiments with pyrotechnics emerged in parallel with the rise of Land art in the 1960s and 1970s, a movement that the artist’s work implicitly critiqued as being hyper-masculine and founded on large-scale interventions into the earth. The Atmospheres sometimes took place in cracks and fissures in the land, the smoke softening the landscape and eventually disappearing altogether. The title for the body of work evokes both meanings of the word atmosphere, understanding it as both the envelope of gasses encircling the planet and the pervading mood or tone of a place at a given moment in time.

Over the years, Judy has made over fifty of these site-specific pieces in parks, beaches, forests, public plazas, and other places. Her fireworks archive has been acquired by the Nevada Museum of Art as part of their major Land art collection, and Judy continues to produce what she now calls Smoke Sculptures, which involve mixing colour in the air.

For the 2022 Toronto Biennial, Judy Chicago created ‘A Tribute to Toronto,’ a piece that took place on the shores of Lake Ontario at Sugar Beach in Toronto. This newly commissioned piece had the artist working directly on a body of water for the first time. Judy and her collaborators—her husband, photographer Donald Woodman and Chris Souza of Pyro Spectaculars—created a sculpture on a barge from which white, yellow, green, blue, and purple pigments were released into the air, mixing with the wind and sunset light to create a myriad of colour effects. In line with the artist’s long history of being a passionate advocate for the environment, the team uses only environmentally friendly, non-toxic materials to temporarily transform sites.

PROCEEDS FROM THE SALE OF THIS WORK DIRECTLY BENEFIT THE TORONTO BIENNIAL OF ART

For Toronto-based supporters, we highly recommend Superframe, a premier, arts focused frame shop. To take advantage of a special Toronto Biennial of Art discount visit www.superframe.ca, call: (416) 913-7590 or email: sales@superframe.ca.

About the Artist →