Feminist artist Judy Chicago receives long-awaited retrospective of her work, which is now visible until January at the Young Museum. And as part of the festivities surrounding the show, Chicago will be bringing one of its performative “smoke” pieces to the Music Concourse on Saturday, October 16.

The exact nature of the exhibit should be seen the same day. These ephemeral pieces, in which Chicago used colorful smoke and fireworks to create land art and momentary images and experiences, date back to the 1960s, as she explains in the video below. Chicago used the deserts and other landscapes of Southern California to create her pieces of smoke – sometimes called “Atmospheres” – and she says she was thinking big and wanted to fill the Grand Canyon with smoke, but that didn’t work. is never reunited.

The last piece of smoke she did in a series was “A butterfly for Oakland“, which was a series of patterned, butterfly-shaped fireworks on the shore of Lake Merritt next to the Oakland Museum in California in 1974.

When the Getty Foundation was launched Pacific Standard Time in 2011, it was an opportunity for many actors in the art world and the general public to reintroduce themselves into Chicago’s work – as a Californian artist who worked continuously through the 1970s (the scope of l exhibition ended in 1980). And since then, Chicago said, he has been asked to create new pieces of smoke – and the Nevada Art Museum in Reno has acquired the archives of all of Chicago’s dry ice, smoke and fireworks pieces, which are now visible until next June.

Judy Chicago recreated the idea of ​​the butterfly with fireworks for a new piece as part of this 2011-12 show at Pomona College Football Stadium.

Young’s play will be brazenly called “Forever de Young,” like KQED tells us. And it will present “a new performance atop a 27-foot-high scaffolding that creates fleeting clouds of color manipulated by the wind.”

Below is an interview with Chicago by deYoung curator Claudia Schmuckli, who has taken charge of the current retrospective. And the duo explain why they chose to hang the series mostly upside down, starting with deYoung’s last work and going back to the 1960s.

Get tickets for Judy Chicago: a retrospective, here, and “Forever de Young” takes place on October 16 at the Music Concourse starting at 5:30 pm. broadcast live on YouTube.