For just about any artist, a major, permanent public commission from a giant global corporation might seem like great news. The artist might expect big budgets, massive exposure, and a ribbon-cutting with the mayor and CEO.
Even Judy Chicago, an icon of feminist art who has had solo exhibitions at institutions from New York’s New Museum to San Francisco’s de Young Museum and whose massive piece The Dinner Party (1974–79) is on permanent view at the Brooklyn Museum, anticipated a “great and historic project,” writes the artist at Artnet News, when Google commissioned her to do a public artwork as part of the multimillion-dollar renovation of the Thompson Center, a historic building in downtown Chicago, the artist’s home town and namesake. (An art dealer gave the artist, born Judith Cohen, her nickname, and it stuck.) The company touts the works of public art on its campuses, not to mention its giant Google Arts & Culture project, where people hungry for knowledge can learn about museums and art history and even play games designed by artists.
But, according to the lengthy Artnet essay, things did not go well. “Want a masterclass in how not to work with artists?” asks the headline, before suggesting, “Ask Google.” The tech company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Chicago’s accounting of her experience.
Having had bad experiences with public projects before, the artist only reluctantly agreed to her dealer’s suggestion that she propose a project incorporating one of her “Through the Flower” images for a terrazzo floor as well as a 17-story glass elevator shaft in the Thompson Center. In fall of 2025, she learned the project was approved; she would work on it with her husband, Donald Woodman, a photographer with a background in architecture. The target date for completing the project was the end of 2027. Images published by Artnet show an impressive atrium space as well as architectural drawings, color blending tests, and digital renderings of the design.
The problems seem to have started right away. The artist writes that she and Woodman immediately had to travel to Chicago on their own dime, in the absence of a signed contract or any payment, for a meeting requested by Google—a company with a current market capitalization of about $3.9 trillion.
The James R. Thompson Center in Chicago’s Loop on Dec. 15, 2021.
Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
A terrazzo floor, the subject of much discussion, had to be finished first, but the artist says they hadn’t been given the promised architectural drawings or precise dimensions. Terrazzo flooring wouldn’t easily lend itself to the gradient hues of her “Through the Flower” works. Woodman and Chicago put in weeks of work recreating a gradient coloration of flower petals; challenges stemming from the color matching even at one point necessitated “a complete rethinking of the design.”
Then there was the 17-story glass elevator shaft, which was to be “the most prominent visual feature of the building’s interior,” she writes, and was to be covered in vinyl printed with her design. Among the major problems there? There were, again, no accurate drawings of the wall. “Presumably,” she says, there hadn’t been tests to see what printed vinyl would look like at that scale, or if using it was even “technically feasible” because of various openings in the wall.
At one point, Chicago writes in her Artnet piece, “Google placed a moratorium on any direct communication between us and the team in Chicago.” That meant all communication had to go through Gray Area, a firm that manages Google’s art projects, slowing things down considerably.
A proposed contract did not even emerge until mid-November, and when it did, it “drastically limited” the artist’s creative control, resulting in lengthy back-and-forth between lawyers for Chicago and for Google; the company exploited the absence of a contract, Chicago claims, as an excuse for “everything they did or didn’t do.”
Thorny contract negotiations were still in progress, she writes, when Gray Area informed her that the project manager had ruled that the rosette in the floor be made so small as to appear a mere decoration, which was, writes Chicago, “completely unacceptable.”
Somewhere around this point, despite months of work and sleepless nights as well as travel and legal expenses, Chicago opted to bail out.
