Judy Chicago

In 2021, the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco featured artist Judy Chicago’s first retrospective, Forever de Young.

This exhibit highlighted and celebrated the many mediums that Chicago worked in outside of her most notable work, The Dinner Party (a triangular dinner table with settings celebrating notable women in history).

Chicago often explored feminist motifs and subject matter in her works, but in the 1960s and 1970s, Chicago experimented with environmental art with smoke, fireworks, and dry ice. These works were titled “Atmosphere.”

In conjunction with photographer Donald Woodman and pyrotechnic expert Chris Souza (Pyro Spectaculars), Chicago reinvented “Atmosphere” for the DeYoung Museum’s retrospective.

The performance rocketed plumes of multi-colored smoke and fireworks from a trapezoidal structure in front of the museum. Upwind and in the sunlight, the performance was exhilarating to view as each new color launched and then slowly mingled with the other colors and then dissipated into the sky. Downwind, spectators walked away with slightly more colorful lungs than they had before the performance.