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Judy Chicago (born Judith Sylvia Cohen; July 20, 1939) is an American , art educator,Chicago, Judy. (2014). Institutional Time. The Monacelli Press. and writer known for her large collaborative art installation pieces about birth and creation images, which examine the role of women in history and culture. During the 1970s, Chicago founded the first feminist art program in the United States at California State University, Fresno, which acted as a catalyst for feminist art and art education during the 1970s.
Chicago's work incorporates a variety of artistic skills, such as needlework, counterbalanced with skills such as welding and pyrotechnics. Her most well-known work is The Dinner Party, which is permanently installed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The Dinner Party celebrates the accomplishments of women throughout history and is widely regarded as the first epic feminist artwork. Other notable art projects by Chicago include International Honor Quilt, Birth Project, Powerplay, (2026). 9780983931232, David Richard Gallery. ISBN 9780983931232 and The Holocaust Project. She is represented by Jessica Silverman gallery.
Chicago was included in Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People of 2018".
May loved the arts and instilled her passion for them in her children. Aged three, Chicago began to draw and was sent to the Art Institute of Chicago to attend classes.Wydler and Lippard, 5. By the age of five, Chicago knew that she "never wanted to do anything but make art" and continued attending extension classes at the Art Institute throughout her childhood and teens. After high school, she applied to an academic degree program at the School of the Art Institute but was denied admission, and instead attended UCLA on a scholarship.
In graduate school, Chicago created a series that was abstract, yet easily recognized as male and female sexual organs. These early works were called Bigamy, and represented the death of her husband. One depicted an abstract penis, which was "stopped in flight" before it could unite with a vaginal form. Her professors, who were mainly men, were dismayed over these works. Despite the use of sexual organs in her work, Chicago refrained from using gender politics or identity as themes.
In 1965, Chicago displayed artwork at her first solo show, at the Rolf Nelson Gallery in Los Angeles. Chicago was one of only four female artists to take part in the show.
In 1968, Chicago was asked why she did not participate in the California Women in the Arts exhibition at the Lytton Center, to which she answered: "I won't show in any group defined as Woman, Jewish, or California. Someday, when we all grow up, there will be no labels." Chicago began working in ice sculpture, which represented "a metaphor for the preciousness of life," another reference towards her husband's death.Levin in Bloch and Umansky, 314.
In 1969, the Pasadena Art Museum exhibited a series of Chicago's spherical acrylic plastic dome sculptures and drawings in an "experimental" gallery. Art in America declared that Chicago's work was at the forefront of the conceptual art movement, and the Los Angeles Times described the work as showing no signs of "theoretical New York type art." Chicago would describe her early artwork as minimalist and as her trying to be "one of the boys."Lewis and Lewis, 455. Chicago would also experiment with performance art, using fireworks and pyrotechnics to create "atmospheres," which involved flashes of colored smoke being manipulated outdoors.Levin in Bloch and Umansky, 315.
During this time, Chicago also began exploring her own sexuality in her work. She created the Pasadena Lifesavers, which was a series of abstract paintings that placed acrylic paint on Plexiglas. The works blended colors to create an illusion that the shapes "turn, dissolve, open, close, vibrate, gesture, wiggle," representing her own discovery that "I was multi-orgasmic." Chicago credited "Pasadena Lifesavers", as being the major turning point in her work in relation to women's sexuality and representation.
In an interview with Art & Object magazine, Chicago reflected on her early career: “My first decade and a half of practice in Southern California, it was incredibly difficult and challenging cause the art world was so inhospitable to women. Still, within that period I built the building blocks of my career, my formal ability, my color systems, the scale I was interested in working, the level of ambition, the level at which I wanted to try and make a contribution. I had a burning desire to make art. I had a lot to say. And I made making art my reward.”
In 1965, she married sculptor Lloyd Hamrol. They divorced in 1979.Felder and Rosen, 280.
Gallery owner Rolf Nelson nicknamed her "Judy Chicago" because of her strong personality and strong Chicago accent. She decided this would be her new name. By legally changing her surname from the ethnically charged Gerowitz to the more neutral Chicago, she freed herself from a certain social identity. Chicago was appalled that her new husband's signature approval was required to change her name legally. To celebrate the name change, she posed for the exhibition invitation dressed as a boxer, wearing a sweatshirt with her new last name on it. She also posted a banner across the gallery at her 1970 solo show at California State University at Fullerton, that read: "Judy Gerowitz hereby divests herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance and chooses her own name, Judy Chicago." An advertisement with the same statement was placed in Artforum's October 1970 issue.
In 1970, Chicago began teaching full-time at Fresno State College, hoping to teach women the skills needed to express the female perspective in their work.Levin in Bloch and Umansky, 317. At Fresno, she planned a class that would consist only of women and decided to teach off campus to escape "the presence and hence, the expectations of men."Levin in Bloch and Umansky, 318. She taught the first women's art class in the fall of 1970 at Fresno State College. It became the Feminist Art Program, a full 15-unit program, in the spring of 1971. This was the first feminist art program in the United States. Fifteen students studied under Chicago at Fresno State College: Dori Atlantis, Susan Boud, Gail Escola, Vanalyne Green, Suzanne Lacy, Cay Lang, Karen LeCocq, Jan Lester, Chris Rush, Judy Schaefer, Henrietta Sparkman, Faith Wilding, Shawnee Wollenman, Nancy Youdelman, and Cheryl Zurilgen. Together, as the Feminist Art Program, these women rented and refurbished an off-campus studio at 1275 Maple Avenue in downtown Fresno. Here they collaborated on art, held reading groups, and discussion groups about their life experiences which then influenced their art. All of the students and Chicago contributed $25 per month to rent the space and to pay for materials.
Later, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro reestablished the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts. After Chicago left for Cal Arts, the class at Fresno State College was continued by Rita Yokoi from 1971 to 1973, and then by Joyce Aiken in 1973, until her retirement in 1992.
Chicago's image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.
With Arlene Raven and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Chicago co-founded the Los Angeles Woman's Building in 1973. This art school and exhibition space was in a structure named after a pavilion at the 1893 World's Colombian Exhibition that featured art made by women from around the world. This housed the Feminist Studio Workshop, described by the founders as "an experimental program in female education in the arts". They wrote: "our purpose is to develop a new concept of art, a new kind of artist and a new art community built from the lives, feelings, and needs of women." During this period Chicago began creating spray-painted canvases, primarily abstract, with geometric forms on them. These works evolved, using the same medium, to become more centered around the meaning of the "feminine". Chicago was strongly influenced by Gerda Lerner.
Chicago's first book, Through the Flower (1975), "chronicled her struggles to find her own identity as a woman artist".
The idea for Womanhouse was sparked during a discussion they had early in the course about the home as a place with which women were traditionally associated, and they wanted to highlight the realities of womanhood, wifehood, and motherhood within the home. Chicago thought that female students often approach art-making with an unwillingness to push their limits due to their lack of familiarity with tools and processes, and an inability to see themselves as working people. "The aim of the Feminist Art Program is to help women restructure their personalities to be more consistent with their desires to be artists and to help them build their art-making out of their experiences as women."
Many art critics, including Hilton Kramer from The New York Times, were unimpressed by her work. Mr. Kramer felt Chicago's intended vision was not conveyed through this piece and "it looked like an outrageous libel on the female imagination." Although art critics felt her work lacked depth and the dinner party was just "vaginas on plates," it was popular and captivated the general public. Chicago debuted her work in six countries on three continents. She reached over a million people through her artwork.
In a 1981 interview, Chicago said that the backlash of threats and hateful castigation in reaction to the work brought on the only period of suicide risk she'd ever experienced in her life, characterizing herself as "like a wounded animal". She stated that she sought refuge from public attention by moving to a small rural community and that friends and acquaintances took on administrative support roles for her, such as opening her mail, while she threw herself into working on Embroidering Our Heritage, the book documenting the project. She further said,
In 1994, Chicago started the series Resolutions: A Stitch in Time, completed over a six-year period. Six years later, Resolutions: A Stitch in Time was exhibited to the public at the Museum of Art and Design in New York.
In 1996, Chicago and Woodman moved into the Belen Hotel, an historic railroad hotel in Belen, New Mexico which Woodman had spent three years converting into a home.
In 1999, Chicago received the UCLA Alumni Professional Achievement Award, and was awarded from Lehigh University, Smith College, Duke University and Russell Sage College.
Chicago was not personally interested in motherhood. While she admired the women who chose this path she did not find it right for herself. In 2012, she said, "There was no way on this earth I could have had children and the career I've had."
Overlapping with Birth Project, Chicago started working independently on PowerPlay in 1982: a series of large-scale paintings, drawings, cast paper reliefs and bronze reliefs. What both the series, however, have in common is that their subject matters deal with issues rarely depicted in Western art. The PowerPlay series was inspired by Chicago's trip to Italy, where she saw the masterpieces of Renaissance artists representing the Western artistic tradition. As Judy Chicago wrote in her autobiographical book: “I was to be greatly influenced by actually seeing the major Renaissance paintings. Looking at their monumental scale and clarity led me to decide to cast my examination of masculinity in the classical tradition of the heroic nude and to do so in a series of large-scale oil paintings.”
The titles of the works such as Crippled by the Need to Control/Blind Individuality, Pissing on Nature, Driving the World to Destruction, In the Shadow of the Handgun, Disfigured by Power, etc., indicate Chicago's focus on male violent behaviour. However, the brightly coloured images of facial expressions and parts of male bodies express not only aggression and power but also vulnerability. Chicago's husband Donald Woodman posed for the piece Woe/Man. She depended “upon her own sense of truth, working from observation, experience, and, of course, her rage at how destructively so many men seem to act toward women and the world at large.”
By depicting male bodies Chicago replaced the traditional male gaze with a female one. As she said: “I knew that I didn’t want to keep perpetuating the use of the female body as the repository of so many emotions; it seemed as if everything – love, dread, longing, loathing, desire, and terror – was projected onto the female by both male and female artists, albeit with often differing perspectives. I wondered what feelings the male body might be made to express.”
Chicago used the Holocaust as a prism through which to explore victimization, oppression, injustice, and human cruelty. To seek inspiration for the project, Chicago and Woodman watched the documentary Shoah, which comprises interviews with Holocaust survivors at Nazi concentration camps and other Holocaust sites. They also explored photo archives and written pieces about the Holocaust. They spent several months touring concentration camps and visited Israel. Chicago brought other issues into the work, such as environmentalism, Native American genocide, and the Vietnam War. With these subjects Chicago sought to relate contemporary issues to the moral dilemma behind the Holocaust. This aspect of the work caused controversy within the Jewish community, due to the comparison of the Holocaust to these other historical and contemporary concerns. The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light consists of sixteen large-scale works made of a variety of mediums including: tapestry, stained glass, metal work, wood work, photography, painting, and the sewing of Audrey Cowan. The exhibit ends with a piece that displays a Jewish couple at Shabbat. The piece comprises 3000 square feet, providing a full exhibition experience for the viewer. The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light was exhibited for the first time in October 1993 at the Spertus Museum in Chicago. Most of the work from the piece is held at the Holocaust Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.Felder and Rosen, 284.
Over the next six years Chicago created works that explored the experiences of concentration camp victims. Galit Mana of Jewish Renaissance magazine notes, "This shift in focus led Chicago to work on other projects with an emphasis on Jewish tradition", including Voices from the Song of Songs (1997), where Chicago "introduces feminism and female sexuality into her representation of strong biblical female characters."
In 2004, Chicago received a Visionary Woman Award from Moore College of Art & Design. She was named a National Women's History Project honoree for Women's History Month in 2008.
To celebrate her 25th wedding anniversary with Woodman, she created a Renewal Ketubah in 2010.
In 2011, Chicago returned to Los Angeles for the opening of the "Concurrents" exhibition at the Getty Museum and performed a firework-based installation piece in the Pomona College football field, a site where she had previously performed in the 1960s. Chicago also donated her collection of feminist art educational materials to Penn State University.
Chicago had two solo exhibitions in the United Kingdom in 2012, one in London and another in Liverpool. The Liverpool exhibition included the launch of Chicago's book about Virginia Woolf. Once a peripheral part of her artistic expression, Chicago now considers writing to be well integrated into her career. That year, she was also awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Palm Springs Art Fair.
From January 17 to April 13, 2014, the National Museum of Women in the Arts exhibited Judy Chicago: Circa ’75. The exhibition celebrated Chicago’s 75th birthday by examining “13 of her artworks that paralleled and influenced the U.S. feminist movement of the 1970s.”
She was interviewed for the 2018 film !Women Art Revolution. In an interview with Gloria Steinem in 2018, Chicago described her "goal as an artist" has been “to create images in which the female experience is the path to the universal, as opposed to learning everything through the male gaze.""Judy Chicago" by Gloria Steinem, December/January 2018 issue of Interview, pp. 28–31
From September 19, 2019, to January 20, 2020, the National Museum of Women in the Arts exhibited Judy Chicago—The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction. “In nearly 40 works of painted porcelain and glass, as well as two large bronze sculptures, Chicago tackles human mortality and species extinction.”
In 2021, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. A major retrospective exhibition, titled Judy Chicago: A Retrospective, was displayed at the De Young Museum in San Francisco in 2021; it was Judy Chicago's first retrospective.
Chicago's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou. (2026). 9780500094372, Thames & Hudson Ltd.; Thames & Hudson Inc. ISBN 9780500094372
In 2022, Chicago collaborated with Nadya Tolokonnikova to transform her What if Women Ruled the World? series into a participatory art project, enabled by blockchain with the hopes of spawning a Web3 community dedicated to gender rights.
Chicago strives to push herself, exploring new directions for her art; early in her career, she attended car-body school to learn to Airbrush and has expanded her practice to include a variety of media including glass. Taking such risks is easier to do when one lives by Chicago's philosophy: "I'm not career driven. Damien Hirst's dots sold, so he made thousands of dots. I would, like, never do that! It wouldn't even occur to me."
From October 2023 to early March 2024, Chicago's work is featured across four floors of the New Museum in New York City in a comprehensive museum survey of her work titled Judy Chicago: Herstory.
Chicago's artwork is held in the permanent collections of several museums including The British Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The Getty Trust, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New Mexico Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her archives are held at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, and her collection of women's history and culture books are held in the collection of the University of New Mexico.
Collaboration is a major aspect of Chicago's installation works. The Dinner Party, Birth Project, and Resolutions were all completed as a collaborative process with Chicago and hundreds of volunteer participants. Volunteer artisans skills vary, often connected to "stereotypical" women's arts such as textile arts. Chicago makes a point to acknowledge her assistants as collaborators, a task at which other artists have notably failed. (2026). 9780820336756, University of Georgia Press. ISBN 9780820336756
The art created in the Feminist Art Program and Womanhouse introduced perspectives and content about women's lives that had been taboo topics in society, including the art world.Fields, Jill (Ed.). (2012). Entering the picture: Judy Chicago, The Fresno Feminist Art Program, and the collective visions of women artists. New York: Routledge.Gerhard, Jane F. (2013). The Dinner Party: Judy Chicago and the power of popular feminism. 1970–2007. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. In 1970 Chicago developed the Feminist Art Program at California State University, Fresno, and has implemented other teaching projects that conclude with an art exhibition by students such as Womanhouse with Miriam Schapiro at CalArts, and SINsation in 1999 at Indiana University, From Theory to Practice: A Journey of Discovery at Duke University in 2000, At Home: A Kentucky Project with Judy Chicago and Donald Woodman at Western Kentucky University in 2002, Envisioning the Future at California Polytechnic State University and Pomona Arts Colony in 2004, and Evoke/Invoke/Provoke at Vanderbilt University in 2005.Chicago, Judy (2014), Institutional Time: A Critique of Studio Art Education. New York, NY: Monacelli Press. Several students involved in Judy Chicago's teaching projects established successful careers as artists, including Suzanne Lacy, Faith Wilding, and Nancy Youdelman.
In the early 2000s Chicago organized her teaching style into three parts: preparation, process, and art-making. Each has a specific purpose and is crucial. During the preparation phase, students identify a deep personal concern and then research that issue. In the process phase, students gather together in a group to discuss the materials they plan on using and the content of their work. Finally, in the art-making phase, students find materials, sketch, critique, and produce art.
In 2022, Judy Chicago and Donald Woodman returned to education after 50 years since Womanhouses debut. Wo/Manhouse 2022, located in Belen, New Mexico, featured 19 New Mexico-based artists exploring gender roles, identity, family, labor, and more through site-specific artworks in a 1950s-style house. The project was facilitated by original Womanhouse participant Nancy Youdelman.
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