You might have seen our new Artspace edition with the legendary feminist artist and icon Judy Chicago. The edition, Birthday Bouquet for Belen, 2026, is a continuation of one of her most important and career-defining works, Atmospheres – a series of performance works that took place between 1968 and 1974.
Chicago, revisited the series on the occasion of her 75th birthday and the edition Birthday Bouquet for Belen, 2026 is the result. You can read our interview with Judy Chicago about the edition here. We thought a little history lesson regarding the importance of the works the edition sprang from would be interesting to our readers and edition buyers.
In the original thirteen performances, referred to as her California Atmospheres works, chromatic plumes of smoke and occasionally flames, created using smoke machines, fireworks, and flares, were staged for audiences in settings around Los Angeles. A subsequent group, Northwest Coast Atmospheres (1970–75), was created during a road trip in the Pacific Northwest and performed solely for the camera.
Judy Chicago - photographed with Birthday Bouquet for Belen, 2026 by Donald Woodman
Although Chicago’s Atmospheres were, and sometimes still are, compared to the work of male artists associated with Land art and the Light and Space movement, her performances were realized with explicit feminist intent, an attempt, as she said at the time, to "feminize the landscape".
Indeed, Chicago’s later smoke pieces incorporated female performers whose nude bodies were often painted with radiant pigments and evoked ancient goddess figures. Their collective presence in the landscape prefigured thel female communities Chicago would go on to create and describe in the radical and defining projects of her career such as Womanhouse (1972) and The Dinner Party (1974–79).
Just as she had mastered auto-body spray paint to produce some of her early works, so Chicago gained proficiency in the male-dominated field of pyrotechnics. Taken as a whole, the series captures the experimentation, exuberance, and ambition of a radical social vision and Chicago’s desire to reimagine the entire universe according to a new feminist ecology.
Writing in the book Judy Chicago: Herstory, Kymberly Pinder takes up the tale in a chapter titled Where there’s smoke: Judy Chicago’s Atmospheres for a better world.
Chicago had been pursuing Minimalist work through painting and abstract sculptural forms, only for her work to be ignored or ridiculed for its pastel color palette. As she has often said, the Atmospheres, or smoke sculptures, were in direct response to the intrusive, sometimes destructive Land art by her male contemporaries such as Michael Heizer and Richard Serra: “I was and am horrified by the masculine built environment and the masculine gesture of knocking down trees and digging holes in the earth.”
These early happenings, performances, or smoke sculptures were an essential part of her evolution as a feminist and her pursuit of redefining art-making through the female experience.
In 1970, Chicago started the women-focused Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno), which she later moved to California Institute of the Arts. In 1972, Chicago joined Miriam Schapiro, and with their students, they transformed a decaying building on Mariposa Avenue in Hollywood into the art installation Womanhouse.
Cover of Womanhouse catalogue, 1972. Edited by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro; designed by Sheila de Bretteville. Courtesy Through the Flower Archives
During this time, she also legally changed her name from Gerowitz to Chicago, eschewing all patriarchal ties, and cofounded the Feminist Studio Workshop and the Woman’s Building with Sheila de Bretteville and Arlene Raven. Her name change, with an exhibition of her work, was announced in two ads in Artforum in 1970. A handwritten note below a photo of one of her Northwest Coast Atmospheres (1970–75)—performed on a beach near Seattle—linked this name change to these works, explaining that she was “changing her name for liberation. The only way she had then managed to make her art more direct, spontaneous and free was in the thirteen atmosphere pieces.”
Originally, these smoke and firework pieces freed Chicago from “the macho art scene” and constraints of painting and sculpture. She had initially been trapping color in transparent domes of varying sizes in her studio, but the smoke sculptures resisted their own form as the landscape, light, and wind shaped them. Chicago first witnessed this transformation during a 1969 art event she organized, Raymond Rose Ritual Environment. She fogged a Pasadena street with low-level smoke machines to dematerialize the space, and when she saw the color wheels on klieg lights she had designed—projecting color onto the smoke in the night sky—she decided, “Fuck it, I’m going to do fireworks.”
Judy Chicago, Immolation, 1972. Archival pigment print, 36 x 36 in(91.44 x 91.44 cm). © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.Courtesy the artist
When she first started, she and her friends would take fireworks into the desert and light them by hand. The photographs and video documenting these performances share both abandon and subversion. Chicago and a companion would run with smoke machines, blanketing bystanders and bikers with smoke; or painted nude women would fill a desert valley with purple, green, and orange smoke.
After taking a four-decade hiatus from smoke sculptures, Chicago was commissioned by the curators of the citywide Los Angeles exhibition Pacific Standard Time to re-create the dry-ice sculpture Sublime Environment (1968) and A Butterfly for Pomona (1974) in 2012. In the intervening years, municipal bureaucracies, insurance companies, and fire marshals had been added to the artistic process for such work. And, unfortunately, colored smoke was no longer available. At that time, she connected with fifth-generation pyrotechnician Chris Souza at Pyro Spectaculars to use computer-driven aerial fireworks.
Judy Chicago - Birthday Bouquet for Belen, 2026 © Chicago Woodman LLC, Judy Chicago/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; photography by Garrett Carroll
A few years later, colored fireworks returned, primarily in the paintball industry, prompting Souza and Chicago to resume hand-lighting smokes while testing compositions in the desert. Bringing back the analog fireworks reintroduced the hand, essential to Chicago’s practice. These productions embody the phrase “Go big or go home” because, unlike her early Atmospheres, they require at least a year to plan and a team of people to execute, with Chicago leading every step. Souza describes them as “musical scores” where “timing is crucial.” He continues, “There is a script. We say there is real time, environmental time, and Judy time. It’s when Judy says, ‘Go!’”
Read our edition launch interview with Judy Chicago and take a closer look at and buy Birthday Bouquet for Belen, 2026.
