Curator Massimiliano Gioni (artistic director of the New Museum) speaks to the iconic feminist artist Judy Chicago about explosions, feminism, politics and everything in between.
Massimiliano Gioni: When interviewing artists of your stature, there is often a tendency to talk about the past. Instead, I am curious how you see your future and if you have any opinion or a vision about the future of the United States and of women in the US in particular.
Judy Chicago: If you had asked me this question two weeks ago, I probably would have answered it differently and more negatively. But seeing what we’re doing with the exhibition and what we are calling “The City of Ladies”—the personal museum section of the show where we are bringing together all these great women artists across the centuries—has had a very big effect on me. I often get asked how I survived the vitriol, the lack of being taken seriously, the efforts to erase me, and all that. And I always answer that it’s because I knew my history as a woman and what women before me had gone through.
It’s a similar feeling to when I started researching The Dinner Party [1974–79]. I discovered not only women’s history but also huge bodies of knowledge and traditions that had simply been kept outside the cultural canon for decades because of culture’s deeply held view that what women do is not important. Bringing all these great women artists together demonstrates the underlying thesis of The Dinner Party: the contributions of women have been erased over and over again.
When I started working on The Dinner Party, what struck me was not only the systematic, recurring erasure of women’s contributions to history and culture but also the fact that rich, complex traditions—such as that of needlework and craft— had been forgotten, dismissed, or undervalued. The refusal and devaluation of women’s work actually showed me a path: it defined my vision and goals. But it also explained a few things that I could never exactly explain before.
MG: What do you mean?
JC: First of all, I understood why I had to be so isolated throughout my career. I had to live and work in isolation and, therefore, be pushed to the margins. I was trying to escape a belief system—patriarchy—that defined the world around me.
Patriarchy is a belief system, which is why women can believe it, too. It’s not simply defined by gender; it’s much bigger than that. It’s an entire ideology, and it’s complex. Feminism is a totally oppositional belief system.
Through my work, I got to know the underpinnings of all that history: I discovered all those women who slowly, steadily built and expanded a feminist, oppositional belief system, which would allow them to exist outside of patriarchy. So for pretty much all my life, I’ve operated in an alternative belief system, and my work and philosophy come out of that. That’s why I had to be isolated—because I had to reinvent a whole world, which takes time, determination, and incredible effort.
Through projects like “Womanhouse” [1972; pp. 82–89], The Dinner Party, the Birth Project [1980–85; pp. 144–55], and now this personal museum, I have understood that so many women before me had to fight in isolation, build their own reality, and, basically, reinvent the entire world around them—first on their own and then together with other women.
To go back to your initial question, the protests we saw in China and in Iran in 2022 and 2023 leave me incredibly optimistic. We are witnessing worldwide protests against patriarchy, and they are proof that we can still invent new belief systems, which are more powerful than the most repressive patriarchal societies.
On the other hand, I find it interesting that even mainstream coverage of these events reveals the deeply embedded fear our culture has of women. The protests in Iran are resulting in the actual dismantling of the religious police. It is an incredible victory. If any other group but women had achieved something similar, it would be celebrated as a historical triumph, but because it is women fighting, I don’t think they are receiving the recognition that other groups would.
You see it just as clearly in the US. The president can write an executive order to protect gay marriage, while women still can’t have an abortion. What is that about? It’s about patriarchy. It’s about keeping women subjugated. It’s about a political system in which a male majority dictates what women can do. There is plenty to be desperate about, but I’m hoping that this worldwide feminist revolution will eventually become strong enough to force a transformation of the political systems on the entire planet—before there’s no world left to save.
MG: Those ideals have always informed your work. And, for me, as a curator and art historian, it has been interesting to see how they have also influenced your approach to teaching and learning art history. I recently read your book Women and Art: Contested Territory [1999], and it is exceptional that you were already thinking of a postcolonial art history in the ’90s and engaging with the work of artists who were far from being considered canonical a quarter of a century ago.
JC: If the feminist belief system is in direct contrast against the patriarchal belief system, and if the real meaning of feminist thought is the complete rethinking of power and the way it has been practiced in a patriarchal belief system, then we need to completely reconfigure all our relationships— personal, intellectual, emotional. Patriarchy is the exercise of power over others: men over women, white people over Black people, human beings over other species and over the planet. It’s a pyramidal hierarchy and, perhaps, even a pyramid scheme. The feminist belief system, instead, is based on the belief that every living creature has a right to live out its species life. This simple belief can entirely transform all the relationships in our world and the way we live with each other.
MG: This might be oversimplistic, but when you started making art and entering the art world, much of the vocabulary of feminism, as it is understood today, still had to be invented— and you greatly contributed to that. The tools you had at your disposal to understand and interpret the world around you must have been very different—and forgive me, I don’t mean to sound condescending. What I am trying to ask is how you developed a feminist consciousness when it was far from the norm? Was there any specific event that pushed you in one direction instead of another? Were there individuals, books, or cultural figures that guided you in what I imagine must have been a radical process of self-discovery and reinvention?
JC: I had a very unusual upbringing. My parents were political activists, particularly my father, so I was raised with a certain amount of political consciousness, which served me well in the ’50s and ’60s. In college, I could already identify what I was encountering as sexism, although that word was not used then. But I couldn’t challenge it openly because the response would have been something like, “What are you, some kind of suffragette?”
My upbringing made me quite different from a lot of other women of my generation, who had no idea they were encountering gender discrimination. When they were getting nowhere in graduate school or art school, or in their early careers as artists in the LA art scene, they almost all took it personally and thought it meant they weren’t good artists. That’s how they interpreted the criticism and resistance. You can’t imagine how many times I heard this. They thought it was them. They thought they were just not good enough or that women really couldn’t be artists. But I never felt that way.
Paradoxically, it might have had to do with the fact that I was fathered. You have to understand that other fathers in my father’s generation didn’t have much to do with their kids. They were usually distant and not involved in the everyday life of their families and their children in particular. But my father adored me, and he spent a lot of time with me and teaching me. He worked nights, and my mother worked days, so he was always there in the afternoon. He would spend hours with me, teaching me about values or just playing word games and reading. The loss of my Marxist father when I was thirteen— at the height of McCarthyism, which basically destroyed him—forced me to make a choice that a lot of adults never make. I had to decide whether I was going to believe what the world thought or my own experience.
So when I went to college and began to encounter all these sexist attitudes toward women, I had the confidence to stand up to it. And when I encountered sexism in the art world, I had the confidence not to feel that it was something wrong with me or my work. Although it definitely undermined me, I was clear-eyed enough to understand that the art world didn’t treat my male peers the same way it treated me.
MG: Possibly as a result of the different treatment you were receiving, it must have become apparent quite early on that being only an artist was not going to be enough for you. You had to become an educator, organizer, activist, publisher, archivist, and your own curator. . . . You had to take on all these different roles because nobody else was going to. When did you realize that, as a woman artist, you needed to be so much more than just an artist?
JC: When I was coming out of graduate school and encountering all this sexism, there was absolutely no shared language for it. We didn’t even know how to talk about it. All I could do was try to make my way through it. In the late ’60s, consciousness- raising groups were starting, but at that point, I had already developed a lot of my own thinking and practice. I was never in a consciousness-raising group because I came to consciousness in my studio in the first decade of working alone.
Incidentally, that’s one of the reasons I related to Anaïs Nin’s diaries as much as I did when I read them in the 1960s: she charts her path into consciousness all by herself. That’s what I went through. So here I am, having this experience in my studio, getting to know and understand myself as an artist and a person, and the moment I walk out onto the street, I am just a “cunt.” There was this incredible contrast; I had to figure out how to deal with that pretty much on my own.
It was only at the end of the 1960s that I started reading the early women’s liberation literature that was coming out of the East. That was the beginning of a new language. It was also what gave us permission to actually talk about what we had been experiencing. At that point, it was clear to me and many others that the patriarchal art system was not going to support women, and we had to construct an alternative. But that lived side by side with my deep desire to be accepted in the art world. I spent pretty much all my life constructing an alternative while still wanting acceptance in the very same art world that wouldn’t let me in.
MG: Did you have a sense that what you were doing was setting up a whole different system that would allow you and your peers to exist?
JC: When I changed my name in 1970, went to Fresno to create a feminist art practice, and set out to build a feminist art education, I did not. I couldn’t have allowed myself to realize how radical it was because that would have meant also understanding the complete isolation in which I was going to have to work and live for decades. What was clear to me was that I had no choice. It was either dig a hole and bury myself or figure out how to stand up against the pressure of exclusion.
In Fresno, I was trying to construct a form of education that would allow me and my students not to have to choose between being a woman and being an artist. When I wrote Through the Flower [1975], my first book, I had a similar goal. Nin suggested I write my way through this incredible confusion.
This idea that I would have to teach, write, organize, and be so much more than just an artist was also probably a reaction against the fact that everybody else was trying to keep women down by insisting that we could only be one thing: a submissive companion for men. It probably also had to do with the fact that I had a huge amount of energy—really, an unbelievable amount. I worked all the time, seventeen to eighteen hours a day, and never thought about it.
But my studio practice was always central. Everything else, all the other things, I did on the side. And always with the hope that the art world would come around. And because the art world wasn’t coming around, for the first twenty years, I kept thinking, “Well, I’ll just make my work better, and I will do everything it takes for it to exist in the world.”
At a certain point—after The Dinner Party, after the art world tried to kill me—I realized I would have to be very, very isolated in order to continue down the path I had eked out. And as I got older and my energy began to wane, I wasn’t happy about the fact that I had to do everything myself. But that was just the way it had to be. I had to do it myself because I had to build what didn’t exist: a language for talking about women- centered art, a structure for showing it, a critical apparatus. I had to do that. There was no context for my work. I had to build it myself.
MG: This might be too superficial of me, but do you feel like you won? Do you think you succeeded? You built a new art world and a whole new context, and your work not only exists within the mainstream art world now, but it’s also celebrated, assimilated even. Do you feel all that effort has actually built the world you wanted?
JC: If it hadn’t, would we even be having this conversation? I have succeeded to a certain extent, but it was a lot of hard work, and so many other women didn’t make it. So, yes, I feel like I’ve accomplished many of the goals I set out when I was young. Absolutely. But I still know there is so much to accomplish. My hope is for a transformed world. Not just for me. We’re a long way from that, and I won’t live to see it, but it’s enough for me to feel that, if it happens, I made a small contribution to it.
When I was at the nadir of my career, after The Dinner Party was ridiculed and described as a relic of the 1970s, I found comfort in the fact that all these women before me—the women in The Dinner Party—had been erased and cast aside, and yet I had found them and learned from them. So all I could hold onto at that moment was the hope that somebody would find me in the future. What I find so touching and important about what we are doing with the “City of Ladies” installation is that all these incredible women artists were there, and they survived against a system that wanted to erase them. For years, I could only take comfort in the fact that somebody would find me, as I found them.
MG: I often ask artists this question: Do you think you were— or still are—making work against something?
JC: You could say my early work was literally an explosion against existing forms. My work with pyrotechnics and smoke was, consciously or unconsciously, a reaction against the patriarchal domination and disfigurement of the land— evidenced in all that early male Land art of the time. That’s the only work that was explicitly polemical or adversarial. Eventually, I understood there was more power in saying “yes” than “no.” And that might be a feminist way of exercising power, as we enable life rather than suppress it.
MG: Your earlier, Minimalist work was still very much in dialogue with your male contemporaries, wasn’t it?
JC: Yes, and that’s because I wanted to be part of their art world. I felt like I needed to learn their language. But no matter how hard I tried, I always felt like I never fit in. My Minimalist work was always too colorful and emotional—that’s how they would describe it—and it just wouldn’t get accepted. Back then, I would suffer because of that exclusion. Today, you know what? I’m like, “Yes! I don’t want to fit in.”
MG: When I was organizing Lynda Benglis’s survey at the New Museum, she told me the reason she withdrew her work from “Anti-Illusion” at the Whitney in 1969 was because all the guys in the show were mad about the fact her work was so colorful. It seems so absurd to me today.
JC: You have to understand how prescriptive and oppressive that scene was. You really have no idea. And how arrogant the guys were.
MG: How was your experience as part of “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum in 1966?
JC: I never went. I never saw that show. People find it hard to believe, but that tells you how isolated and on the margins I was. If, say, Larry Bell or any of the guys were invited to be in “Primary Structures,” their friends would have said, “That’s amazing. You’ve got to go to the opening.” Not one single person said that to me. I didn’t know that when you’re in a big New York show, you’re supposed to get on the airplane and go to the opening. I was so isolated that I was completely ignorant of the rules of the art system, and there was nobody to tell me how it worked.
MG: And how did your inclusion in that show come about?
JC: That was actually because of my first dealer. At the time, I didn’t understand what a big deal it was. In all honesty, it was only in retrospect that the exhibition took on such historic relevance. My first dealer, Rolf Nelson, was actually a pretty good guy. You have to keep in mind that as a woman artist in the 1960s, there was no way you could make it on your own. Rolf was one of the people who really helped me, and I am very thankful for that. He was showing women even in the 1960s, when not many others did. And, somehow, he got Kynaston McShine, the curator of “Primary Structures,” to look at my work and put it in the show. I didn’t meet Kynaston at the time, so I think it was all through Rolf.
MG: Were there other curators or critics you were in dialogue with?
JC: It would be easier to tell you who wouldn’t talk to me. Walter Hopps—who, at the time, was probably the most influential curator in LA—tried to pretend I didn’t exist. He later said that looking at my work had felt like watching a woman hike up her skirt . . .
MG: What about the artists in the Ferus Gallery circle? Were you in touch with them?
JC: I used to hang out with them. I used to go to Barney’s Beanery, the bar where the guys from Ferus would hang out, and then I would go home and cry. I couldn’t believe how they talked to each other and about women. They called each other “cunts” all the time.
MG: Was there any other woman artist connected with that scene?
JC: No, absolutely not. All the women that now are somewhat understood as being part of that period were simply not visible. Helen Pashgian was totally ignored, considered a housewife— her work was never even looked at. After my first effort to discuss my experiences in the 1960s LA art scene, Bob Irwin came up to me and said, “Judy, if it hadn’t been you, nobody would have listened,” because I already had some reputation and managed to be there with the guys for some time. Billy Al Bengston was sort of supportive. Once, he said, “Judy was the only woman among us.” But things were so tough I had to rely on those who could help me with the most basic stuff.
There have been a few individuals who supported me, and what they did at the time was completely exceptional. And I am not talking about curators. Brian Cooke—who owns a big storage and crating company now—let me store my work for years for very little money. Manny Silverman framed my work, and he let me pay it out and trade works in exchange for frames. I lost a lot of my early work because there was simply no way to sell it or even keep it, and these people were there for me when nobody else was—as were my first patrons, Stanley and Elyse Grinstein.
Among the curators and writers, John Coplans—who was very involved in founding Artforum—was friendly and wrote about my work. But he used to say: “Judy, you’ve got to decide if you want to be a woman or an artist.”
MG: What do you think he meant? That your work was too personal?
JC: Oh, no, no. It was much simpler than that: “Do I want to make art, or do I want to be fucked?” And to think I was under the impression I could do both!
MG: It’s around this time in LA that you started making works that transformed your persona and identity into a medium for your work. Your ads in Artforum, your name abdication, the photo in the boxing ring—they are all from this time. You started playing with the travesty of gender, a few years ahead of Benglis’s famous ad in Artforum and ages before people started talking about gender as a performance.
JC: Coplans was still around when I did those ads. He and Phil Leider—the editor and one of the founders of Artforum—were very helpful with the boxing ad. At the time, I was having
a show with this dealer Jack Glenn who had a beautiful gallery in Orange County, and he had the idea of running an ad for the show. It was around the time when all the Ferus Gallery guys were doing these macho ads: Ken Price on the surfboard, Larry Bell with the cigar, Billy Al with the motorcycle. I thought it was hysterical. So I did my boxing ad as a parody of theirs. But my dealer didn’t want to pay for an Artforum ad, so Phil ran it for free. LA at the end of the ’60s was a pretty radical place: the women’s movement was starting, the Black Panthers were operating, and farm workers were revolting.
MG: I want to ask you about your own political work. You said you have done work in isolation and against others, but there is so much work—starting with “Womanhouse”—that you have done collectively.
JC: I wouldn’t say my work has been collective. I would say collaborative.
MG: In the 1960s, you were still trying to fit in, or you were exacerbating this fracture between you and the guys. But around 1970, there is a kind of seismic shift in your work, and you decide to invent your own world and work with others to build it. It’s the beginning of a notion of art that is relational, open, somewhat more radical because it also reinvents ideas around authorship.
JC: I was always interested in collaboration. Even in the 1960s, I was trying to bring people together and organize artist events. You also have to keep in mind that there was not much of a market in the LA art scene in the 1960s: there wasn’t the kind of cutthroat competition you would have in New York. A lot of my early work was collaborative in nature—the dry ice and smoke pieces were always a kind of team effort. But it wasn’t until I started organizing with women in the 1970s that I realized there had always been a difficult dynamic in trying to collaborate with men. When I began collaborating with women, all these different possibilities opened up.
MG: One could argue that, from “Womanhouse” onward, all your work becomes a form of public art, and it is collaborative and civic at its core. We hear so much about Warhol’s Factory as a collective experiment, but the way in which “Womanhouse,” The Dinner Party, the Birth Project, and even the Holocaust Project [1985–93; pp. 182–93] reimagined authorship and participation is quite radical. You imagined an open network, a kind of collective intelligence.
I don’t want to be naive about it: I know there has been a fair share of criticism for the way in which, according to some people, this network seemed to replicate a system of outsourcing that had, in fact, confined women to the domestic sphere and cheap labor. But I also know that the way you reimagined how an artwork is made was quite radical and the result of a history of oppression and underappreciation of women’s work.
JC: Diane Gelon came to work with me in the early stages of The Dinner Party, after I had been working on it alone for a year and a half. She was an art history graduate, and, like me, she knew the history of all those great male artists with their fabulous ateliers—after all, that was what the Factory was, too, wasn’t it? Diane said to me: “We are going to build what has always been available to men.” So I was thinking of the studio for The Dinner Party as the feminist version of Rubens’s studio. Was it a place where people worked together? Yes! Was it a place where many women were heard and understood more than they were in their own homes? Yes, perhaps it was.
But I would hesitate to say it was a collective. It was my vision. I made all the final aesthetic decisions. One of the things that consistently emerges when you speak with people who worked with me at the time is that they would describe their experience as creating within my creation. In other words, the vision of The Dinner Party was so big it allowed them to bring their ideas into how best to represent all the different women we were paying tribute to. When we got to needlework design, in particular, it was incredible to see how all the participants were able to rediscover different techniques—all this knowledge that we had kept alive together as women, which was unrecognized and constantly at the risk of being forgotten. The Dinner Party was also this incredible exercise in unearthing knowledge, which became a central part of all my future projects.
After The Dinner Party, I realized I couldn’t be with so many people in the studio all the time. I had given up my life and space for that piece, so I couldn’t imagine continuing to live that way. At that point, the Birth Project came about quite naturally because, after The Dinner Party began touring, I started getting hundreds of letters from women across the US and all over the world who asked if they could contribute to what I was doing or how they could work with me.
So I started answering these letters, and I would ask the women to send me a sample of an image I had designed, executing it in a needlework technique of their choice. This whole world of knowledge opened up again, and it wasn’t just fabulous techniques I didn’t know about—like macramé, filet crochet, or stumpwork—it was also a whole universe of affections and experiences. I started asking them how motherhood and birthing had been for them, and many of the women participating told me that, in the Birth Project, they found a space to process many of the complicated feelings they had associated with giving birth and maternity.
MG: Was the Birth Project ever shown in its entirety?
JC: No, the eighty-five pieces that compose it have never been shown together.
MG: That’s another show we have to do somewhere together. But this leads me to another question: When did you start thinking of your work as cycles and as total installations?
JC: Actually, for the Birth Project, I had the idea of doing an exhibition across the US, a kind of open form. I wanted to hang the embroideries on clotheslines across the country. I wanted to invent another distribution system. The Dinner Party
had been exhausting—I had tried to go up against the art system and had to make my own structure, my own traveling museum. But when I was done with it, I knew I wasn’t going to do it again. It took thirty years to find a home for The Dinner Party, so I wasn’t going to go through all that again. But yes, somehow this idea of large, ambitious projects stayed with me.
MG: The Dinner Party, the Birth Project, and the Holocaust Project are all investigative enterprises, very much motivated by this desire to learn and know more. I am curious if you had any model in mind when you started thinking about those cycles. The idea of a traveling museum in particular, like The Dinner Party, is quite insane in its complexity and ambition.
JC: I was thinking of all the great art from the Renaissance— the commissions in chapels and the huge installations. I was thinking of The Last Supper. The porcelain boudoir in the Palace of Capodimonte in Naples was also a very important model for The Dinner Party.
MG: But those were never meant to travel. To me, it’s such a quintessentially American idea: make the Sistine Chapel and then take it on the road.
JC: At the beginning, the idea was to travel The Dinner Party as a traditional museum show. I never thought it would travel the way it did, and it wasn’t because of me—it was because of Diane Gelon’s grassroots organizing. She was like, “I didn’t spend five years of my life supporting Judy making this piece for it to be in storage.” She was the one that got it on the road and made it travel. And the amazing thing was that The Dinner Party produced its own parallel art world: it made its own institutions and infrastructures. That was exceptional. I stood outside of so many presentations of The Dinner Party witnessing thousands of people lining up to go inside, and when it came to New York, Hilton Kramer and the so-called “New York art world” tried to say it wasn’t even art.
From the very beginning, The Dinner Party was a kind of test. I wanted to see if the art system would accept a woman working at the same level of ambition as a man. Would she find the same support? And the answer was a resounding “no.” But that refusal gave me strength and forced me to conceive The Dinner Party as a kind of multimedia platform—there was the show, a book, a film. If it hadn’t had all those different components, The Dinner Party would have been buried and forgotten like the work of so many other women.
MG: You always had a very strong public persona, which has made many of your projects into a kind of civic, social sculpture—and I use Joseph Beuys’s idea of social sculpture quite deliberately. What was your relationship with the media?
JC: When The Dinner Party opened, and Newsweek covered it, the reporter said to me, “Judy, you’re a natural story!” That was a total surprise because my experience was actually the opposite. I would completely somatize when I had my openings. When reporters asked me the same question over and over, I would literally get a bladder infection. When The Dinner Party opened in Boston, I tried new makeup and broke out in a rash. I was sitting there, and these buses were going by with my name on them, and I was like, “I have no money. I have pimples all over my face. I have no boyfriend or lover. My life is a mess.” That’s always been my experience. My relationship with the media is quite different from what people have imagined. I am not a self-promoter; I don’t particularly enjoy the exposure. But I’m authentic, and I don’t give canned answers.
MG: I always wondered if this media friendliness had to do with the Artforum ads and the name change: those gestures made you into a kind of media personality.
JC: No, I think it happened before I changed my name. I was on some TV show in LA in the 1960s where they interviewed artists, and I remember Stanley Grinstein seeing it and saying, “Judy, you’re a star.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. And his wife said, “You’re so glamorous.” I thought they were talking about someone else. People have had a lot of very odd ideas about me. MG: From the 1970s onward, we have seen so many artists making their lives into their most important artwork. Did you ever think your public persona was somehow part of your work?
JC: No. I never thought about it that way, and I still don’t. It was just something I had to do: I had to promote my work just to keep it out there. I had to do it, especially when the whole so-called “art world” was trying to kill my work. That’s also why I had to write so many books. Nobody was showing my work in the early 1970s. I couldn’t find one single gallery in New York, and I didn’t have my first New York show until 1984 at ACA Galleries. After that, I went twenty years without a single gallery show in New York.
The books became my distribution system, and thousands of people would buy them, read them, and see my work that way. I had to build my own audience. And in those days, you could get nice advances for books, so I could even make money that way. I had to make books and teach because my work was not selling at all.
The interesting thing about being a woman artist at that time was, even if you managed to be in a big show like “American Sculpture of the Sixties” at LACMA or “Primary Structures,” nobody would call you up. My male colleagues, when they were in shows like that, literally had lines outside the door. For me, nothing would happen. Nothing. There was no choo-choo train for us. That was a male train. After any of my big projects, like The Dinner Party or the Birth Project, I had nothing. When we finished the Holocaust Project, we were $55,000 in debt on our credit cards. We had no place to live. I had the whole opposite experience: accomplishment—slam; accomplishment—punishment; accomplishment—financial failure. Meanwhile, hundreds of people are coming up and thanking me for my work and telling me how it changed their lives. It was so confusing for so long. But that’s how you learn to make your own reality.
Words by Massimiliano Gioni
This article first appeared in Issue 49 of Elephant Magazine. Available to buy now. Text is excerpted from Judy Chicago: Herstory edited by Massimiliano Gioni, Gary Carrion-Murayari, and Margot Norton is published by Phaidon in association with the New Museum, £59.95 (Phaidon.com)
