Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago (born Judith Sylvia Cohen) is an American feminist artist, art educator 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.For over sixty years Chicago has explored the possibilities of painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, textiles, photography, stained glass, needlepoint and printmaking. Her output stretches from her 1960s experiments in Minimalism over her revolutionary feminist art of the 1970s to her narrative series of the 1980s and 1990s, in which she expanded her focus to confront environmental disaster, birth/creation, masculinity and mortality. Her feminist methodology, within the many art movements in which she has participated—and from whose histories she has frequently been erased—, have generated works of art that showcases her tremendous impact on American art, whilst highlighting her critical role as a cultural historian claiming space for women artists previously omitted from the canon.

She is considered one of the ‘first-generation feminist artists’, who sought to develop feminist writing and art, in Europe and the United States in the early 1970s. Chicago drew inspiration from the ‘ordinary’ woman, a central focus of the early 1970s feminist movement. This influenced her work, notably in The Dinner Party (1974-1979, mixed media, permanent exhibit in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY, U.S.A.) reflecting her fascination with textile work and craft often culturally associated with women. Chicago, however, also trained herself in ‘macho arts’, taking classes in auto body work, boat-building and pyrotechnics. Through auto body work she learned spray painting techniques and the skill to fuse colour and surface to any type of media, which would become a signature of her later work.

Chicago graduated, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, from University of California, Los Angeles, in 1962. She also received a Master of Fine Arts, from the same university, two years later. Soon after (in 1965), Chicago had her first solo exhibition, at the Rolf Nelson Gallery in Los Angeles. This was followed by her participation in a group exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York the following year, called Primary Structures. She was then working in a minimalist style while at the same time questioning the possibilities of making an impact and expressing oneself within the limitations of formalistic intellectual minimalism. In 1968, Chicago was asked why she did not participate in the California Women in the Arts exhibition at the Lytton Center, Los Angeles, 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.’

One consequence of this questioning was her purchase in 1970 of a full-page ad in the art magazine ArtForum, announcing that she was changing her name from Gerowitz to Chicago. The reason she stated was that no one should be forced to bear a name which had been decided in a social system dominated by males. Members of the Black Panther movement had, in a similar act, rid themselves of their family names, which for them reinforced the heritage of their ‘slave’ identity.

In 1970, Chicago began teaching full-time at Fresno State College, California hoping to teach women the skills needed to express the female perspective in their work. In 1971, Chicago founded the first feminist art program in the United States (teaching off campus to escape ‘the presence and hence, the expectations of men’) at California State University (formerly Fresno State College), which acted as a catalyst for feminist art and art education during the 1970s. Later that year Chicago, having become a teacher at the California Institute for the Arts, initiated, together with Miriam Shapiro (1923 – 2015, Canadian-born artist based in the United States and a pioneer of feminist art), the project Womanhouse (January 30 – February 28, 1972, a feminist art installation and performance space, as well as the first public exhibition of art centered upon female empowerment) before, once again with Shapiro, reestablishing the Feminist Art Program, this time at the California Institute for the Arts.

During a time when the art world in America was, to put it in extreme terms, still restricted to a male network in New York and their contacts in Europe, Judy Chicago emerged to become one of the most influential artists of a new and more radical art scene with links to the increasingly vocal civil rights movement. Chicago created her most iconic works during the 1970s and 80s. Her installation piece entitled The Dinner Party (1974–79) is a ceremonial, triangular banquet table which recalls the memory of 1,038 named historic and mythological women whose importance has been denied in male historiology. The Dinner Party became a watermark in the debate at the time. Hailed by many as setting an artistic precedent, it was at the same time criticized by the prevailing modernist art criticism as well as the new generation of post-structural feminists. Later in The Birth Project (1980–85), working together with 150 women textile artisans, using ‘low’ traditional feminine techniques such as appliqué and embroidery, she created a monumental work on childbirth. In 2020, fashion house Dior worked with her to finally build her 1977 design for a colossal sculpture of the Mother Goddess in the gardens of the Rodin Museum in Paris, as part of its spring-summer haute couture show. Collaboration is a major aspect of Chicago’s installation works. The Dinner Partyand Birth Project were both 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.

A major exhibition, titled Judy Chicago: A Retrospective, was displayed at the De Young Museum, San Francisco, California, in 2021; it was Chicago’s first retrospective. That same year her work was also included in the exhibition Elles font l'abstraction. Une autre histoire de l'abstraction au XXe siècle (Women in Abstraction. Another History of Abstraction in the 20th Century), a major exhibition of 20th century abstract art created by women, at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. From October 2023 to early March 2024, Chicago’s work also featured across four floors of the New Museum, New York in a comprehensive museum survey of her work titled Judy Chicago: Herstory.

Accolades given to Chicago includes a Visionary Woman Award from Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2004) and the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Palm Springs Art Fair, Palm Springs, California (2012). In 2021, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

Chicago’s artwork is held in the permanent collections of several museums including, amongst many others, the British Museum, London; the Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY, U.S.A.; the Getty Trust; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S.A.; the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), Washington D.C.; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, U.S.A. 

As part of her efforts to overcome the erasure that has eclipsed the achievements of too many women, Judy Chicago has placed her archives with four institutions. Her paper archives are at the Schlesinger Library for the History of Women in America at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.; her art education archives, and ‘The Dinner Party K-12 curriculum’ (written by Chicago with a team of distinguished curriculum writers at Penn State), are at the Pennsylvania State University Libraries, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.; her visual archives are housed at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), Washington D.C. and her comprehensive fireworks archives, including materials related to Chicago’s extensive bodies of work with colored smoke, dry ice and fireworks, are part of the Center for Art + Environment Archive Collections at the Nevada Museum of Art, Nevada, U.S.A. A complete collection of her work in printmaking is held at the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. These five institutions have collaborated to create the Judy Chicago Portal, providing unified access to these archives and collections. Additionally, the Judy Chicago Art Education award, given annually by Through the Flower, a non-profit organization co-founded by Judy in 1977, is available to researchers in any of the five archives. Chicago’s collection of women’s history and culture books, finally, are held in the collection of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A.