Judith Raphael

Judith Raphael (born 1938) is an American figurative painter and educator based in Chicago. She is known for provocative depictions of childhood, particularly contemporary girlhood and its passage toward adulthood. This work emerged in the wake of feminism, and in style and content, was influenced by figurative painters such as Paula Rego, Balthus and Lucian Freud. Her paintings often recast heroic art-historical portrayals of men (e.g., appropriated postures from classical sculptures of David and Greek warriors) with contemporary girls in order to redress the paucity of strong female icons in Western art. recognized with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and National Academy Museum,

Life and career Raphael was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1938. She taught art at Moraine Valley Community College from 1969 to 2000 and also at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

In her early career, Raphael exhibited at venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, Hyde Park Art Center, ARC, Artemisia Gallery, Chicago Cultural Center and Gwenda Jay Gallery. Later exhibitions took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Illinois State Museum, Frye Art Museum, the 55 Mercer (New York), Lyons Wier and Gesheidle (both Chicago) galleries, and the Riverside Arts Center, among others. By the early 1980s, she began to incorporate creatures—a taxidermied fox, iguana, crow or hawk—into carefully observed watercolors of increasingly complex, staged tableaux. These narrative works depicted impassive figures—most often girls and young women in enigmatic, vaguely disturbing or ritual-like situations with older men or boys (e.g., Daddy's Girl or In Motion, 1996). Paintings like Victory Parade or Conquest and Clemency (both 1998) referenced celebratory tableaux of Roman soldiers returning from battle; in the latter, a girl fearlessly rides a fierce pit bull into a group of girls playing with a hula hoop, leotard and microphone. Her work belongs to the public collections of the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Rockford Art Museum, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, State of Illinois, and St. Xavier College.