Judy Chicago

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Judy Chicago, 1971, photo: Jerry McMillan

Judy Chicago (born Judy Cohen on July 20, 1939) is a feminist artist, author, and educator.

Judy Chicago is a feminist artist who has been making work since the middle 1960s. Her earliest forays into art-making coincided with the rise of Minimalism, which she eventually abandoned in favor of art she believed to have greater content and relevancy. Major works include The Dinner Party and The Holocaust Project.

Born in 1939 in Chicago, she moved to Los Angeles in 1957 to attend UCLA art school, where she graduated in 1962 Phi Beta Kappa. In 1964, she received her MA from UCLA in painting and sculpture. In 1966, Chicago's work "Rainbow Pickets" was shown in "Primary Structures," a major minimalist exhibition at the Jewish Museum. In 1970, Chicago founded the first Feminist Art program at California State University at Fresno. This program was documented in the film "Judy Chicago and the California Girls", directed by Judith Dancoff and released in 1971. She also changed her last name to Chicago, emulating members of the Black Panther movement, who believed their given names only re-enforced their "slave" identities.

In 1971 Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro jointly founded the CalArts Feminist Art Program for the California Institute of the Arts. Together they organized one of the first-ever feminist art exhibitions - Womanhouse - 30 January-28 February 1972. In 1973, Chicago co-founded the Feminist Studio Workshop, located inside the Los Angeles Women's Building, a seminal feminist art teaching and exhibition space.

Judy Chicago is most famous for her 1974-1979 work The Dinner Party. This work, in which hundreds of volunteers participated, will soon be permanently housed at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. It is a homage to women's history in the form of a large triangular table with symbolic ceramic plates representing 39 famous feminist guests-of-honor. Other famous works include Birth Project (which brought together a national network of skilled needle-workers 1980 -1985), the 1993 Holocaust Project personifying the final solution, and the 1994 work Resolutions, which returned to the theme of feminism, a thread that runs through all of her work.

Currently, Chicago is married to photographer Donald Woodman and serves as the Artistic Director of Through the Flower, a non-profit arts organization created in 1978 to support her work. Her latest body of work is titled Chicago in Glass. A forthcoming biography, Becoming Judy Chicago, by Dr. Gail Levin, will be released in February, 2007.

Written works

• Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (1975)
• The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage (1979)
• Embroidering Our Heritage: The Dinner Party Needlework (1980)
• The Birth Project (1985)
• Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light (1993)
• The Dinner Party (1996)
• Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist (1996)
• Fragments from the Delta of Venus (2004)
• Kitty City: A Feline Book of Hours (2005)

"Chicago in Glass" will be on view at the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery, Waterloo ON from September 9th to November 11th, 2007.

References

• Busch, Julia M., "A Decade of Sculpture: the New Media in the 1960's" (The Art Alliance Press: Philadelphia; Associated University Presses: London, 1974) ISBN 0-87982-007-1

External links

• Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution from the Jewish Women's Archive
• CAFKA.TV's coverage of the opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, featuring Judy Chicago's Dinner Party
• Judy Chicago's website
• Judy Chicago's Archive at LewAllen Contemporary
• Documentary film Judy Chicago & the California Girls