Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago (Judy Gerowitz Chicago) , 1939-, American artist, b. Chicago as Judy Cohen. A feminist and founder of the Women's Art Education collective, she works in a variety of media, including such historically female crafts as needlework and china painting. Her best-known work, The Dinner Party (1974-78), is a sexually explicit multimedia installation executed by Chicago and a large group of craftswomen. An iconic feminist work that pays tribute to 39 notable women and their historically significant contributions to civilization (and also includes the names of 999 lesser known women), it became part of the Brooklyn Museum of Art collection in 2002 and the centerpiece of the museum's newly opened Sackler Center for Feminist Art in 2007. Subjects explored in her later projects have included childbirth, women's perception of men, and the Holocaust.

Bibliography: See her autobiographical Through the Flower (1975, rev. ed. 1982) and Beyond the Flower (1996) and her The Dinner Party: From Creation to Preservation (2007); biography by G. Levin (2007).

Chicago, Judy (1939– ). American painter, sculptor, and experimental artist, born Judy Cohen in Chicago, from which she takes her adopted name. She studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, 1960–4, and has worked mainly in California. Probably the most famous of Feminist artists, she was co-founder (1971) with Miriam Schapiro of the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. She is best known for her sculpture or installation The Dinner Party (Through the Flower Corporation, 1974–9), which has been seen by large audiences at several venues in the USA and elsewhere (its first showing was in San Francisco in 1979, when it attracted 100,000 visitors in three months). In a publicity leaflet for its appearance at the 1984 Edinburgh Festival it was described as: ‘an open triangular banquet table, 48 feet on each side, with 39 place settings, each representing a woman of achievement in Western civilization. Plates of delicate china-painted porcelain rest on elaborate cloth runners of needlework typical of each woman's era. The table rests on the Heritage Floor of porcelain tiles inscribed with the names of 999 other women who have made significant contributions to our cultural development.’ Many women worked on the project, one of Chicago's aims being to elevate crafts that were traditionally associated with women to the mainstream of art. Her subsequent work has included other collaborative projects. She has written books on The Dinner Party (1979), The Birth Project (1985), and The Holocaust Project (1993), and also Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (1975) and Beyond the Flower (1996).