As a pioneer of feminist art in the 1970s, Judy Chicago (b. 1939) challenged the patriarchal art world with a trailblazing body of work across mediums that reflects her commitment to the power of art as a vehicle for intellectual transformation and socio-environmental change. Born Judy Cohen, she changed her last name to Chicago after the untimely death of her first husband – a gesture that honoured the location of her birth and allowed her to establish an independent identity. Chicago, who elevated traditional forms of women’s labour such as sewing and quilting to the status of high art, is best known for her 1974-9 monumental sculpture The Dinner Party,a triangular banqueting table whose thirty-nine place settings anticipate the arrival of iconic women from across history. Early in her career she adopted a Minimalist aesthetic in an attempt to learn the visual language of her male counterparts and so find acceptance in their world. But by the early 1970s she was experimenting with performance art, using pyrotechnics and coloured smoke to pursue a radically feminist agenda.

The film Women and Smoke documents a series of performances made between 1971 and 1972 that were conceived as a feminist response to the male-dominated Land Art movement, which was characterised by bulldozing, excavating and disfiguration of the natural world. In a bid to ‘feminise’ the landscape and bring attention to the beauty and fragility of our shared environment, Chicago executed a series of site-specific works in which female figures, whose naked bodies are painted orange, purple and green, ceremonially release smoke of the same colours into the Californian desert; as they sit, stand or dance, each woman becomes engulfed in the smoke. The filmed scenes, which evoke goddess rituals and ancient spiritual practices, remained in the artist’s archives until 2016, when the original tapes were restored and edited into the present work.