Judy Chicago b. 1939

JUDY CHICAGO

 

Judy Chicago is an artist, author, feminist, educator, and intellectual whose career now spans five decades. Her art has been frequently exhibited in the United States as well as in Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.

 

In the early seventies after a decade of professional art practice, Chicago turned her attention to the subject of women’s history to create her most well-known work, The Dinner Party, which was executed between 1974 and 1979 with the participation of hundreds of volunteers. This monumental multimedia project, a symbolic history of women in Western Civilization, has been seen by more than one million viewers during its sixteen exhibitions held at venues spanning six countries. In 2007, The Dinner Party was permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum as the centerpiece of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

 

In 2014, in honor of Chicago’s 75th birthday, a series of exhibitions and events were held around the country at various institutions and galleries including the Palmer Museum at Penn State University; the National Museum of Women in the Arts; the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute/Harvard; Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, sponsored by Nyehaus; the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum; the New Mexico Museum of Art; David Richard Gallery in Santa Fe; and Redline in Denver.

 

For over five decades, Chicago has remained steadfast in her commitment to the power of art as a vehicle for intellectual transformation and social change and to women’s right to engage in the highest level of art production. In 2018 Chicago was named both one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” and a 2018 “Most Influential Artist” by Artsy Magazine. In 2019, she received the Visionary Woman award from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

 

Her work is in the collections of the British Museum, Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), National Gallery (Washington DC), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Hammer Museum, Getty Trust and Getty Research Institute, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and over 25 university art museums such as Brandeis, Cornell, Harvard, Illinois, Michigan, UCLA, Canterbury (New Zealand) and Cambridge (UK).