The inspiration for the cover of T’s women’s issue was a 1970 black-and-white photograph of Judy Chicago sitting in a boxing ring. She wears satin shorts and a sweatshirt printed with her name, a gloved hand on each knee. She looks ready to take a swing.
Often referred to as Judy Chicago’s “boxing ring ad” because the photograph ran in the December 1970 issue of Artforum, the story behind its creation is slightly more complicated. Taken by the photographer Jerry McMillan, the picture was created for a mailer by Chicago’s new dealer at the time, Jack Glenn (he’s the man sitting in the shadows), to promote a solo show of Chicago’s at Cal State Fullerton. Glenn’s gallery had nothing to do with the Fullerton show, but it was located nearby in Orange County, and it made sense for Glenn to promote new representation. The mailer landed on the desk of Artforum’s editor Philip Leider, and it was Leider who suggested that Glenn run it as an advertisement in the magazine. Glenn declined, saying the rate was too expensive — so Leider, who liked the picture, ran it anyway.
Chicago is a pioneering feminist artist whose career has only recently gained the recognition it deserves. Well before she created her most famous work of feminist art, “The Dinner Party” (1979), she was, as Sasha Weiss explains in her profile, “one of the few women to participate in the burgeoning scene around the Ferus Gallery, a locus of West Coast cool whose artists included Edward Kienholz, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses and Ken Price. This storefront on La Cienega Boulevard represented an irreverent hyper-masculinity. (A 1959 photograph showed four Ferus artists draped over a motorcycle.)” Chicago wanted to create a similar looking image that poked fun at the machismo of the male-dominated art world while also placing her squarely within it. “That scene was completely inhospitable to women,” Chicago explained to me after she restaged the boxing ring ad for T. “I was told all the time I couldn’t be an artist and a woman, too.”
The original shoot was fast and loose, an informal production — McMillan said he was the one to come up with the idea to make Chicago a boxer. “We knew Judy well,” he told me, “Judy was a fighter.” Glenn found a gym, paid the owner to let them stage the picture and got some sweatshirts printed with Chicago’s name. Chicago asked someone she barely knew, a friend’s girlfriend, to play the part of her trainer. Women boxers were unheard-of at the time. What she remembers most vividly was that the men training in the gym were startled to see a woman in their midst: “I got a kick out of spoofing the boys.” Things ran late; Chicago had to catch a flight back to Fresno that afternoon. She was itching to get back to her studio. McMillan said he didn’t have much time, but he got the shot.
Even though Artforum’s large readership helped circulate the image of Chicago far and wide, no one quite anticipated the effect it would have on people. “It became a symbol, I guess,” Chicago explains. The photograph was taken just on the cusp of the women artist’s movement. A year later, Linda Nochlin would publish her seminal essay “Why Are There No Women Artists?” in Artnews; four years after that, the Guerrilla Girls would launch their first protest against the lack of inclusion of women artists at MoMA. “I was traveling and lecturing and when I would visit women artists they would have the boxing ring ad up in their studios,” Chicago says. “I’d meet male artists and they’d ask me, ‘Do you want to box?’” Chicago had struck a nerve.
Today, Chicago is proud of the image’s legacy. Her excitement in recreating it for T — now with Collier Schorr behind the camera, and models Dilone and Jenny Shimizu (both champions of diversity in the fashion industry) in the ring — is genuine. This time, she didn’t dress like a boxer and wore her own clothes. She said, “I wanted to send the message that I fought for a place in a male dominated environment and I fought as a woman. I’m a woman. I made a mark as a woman. I wanted to transmit that in how I dressed.” But even so, Chicago remembers the battle, how hard it was to fight for what she deserved. “You have to understand that for a very, very long time, I didn’t fit in,” she says. “I had to be isolated. I told Sasha that there were a lot of times in my career when I didn’t know what to do.” By stepping into the ring once more, Chicago is an example to us all.