Judy Chicago, 2021
Photo © Donald Woodman/Artists Rights Society, New York
Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago (born Judith Sylvia Cohen, 1939, Chicago, Il) is one of the most influential artists of our century, an author, feminist, educator and intellectual, and a 2022 inductee into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Over the course of her six-decade career, social and environmental justice have been the driving force behind some of her most important projects as she continues to fight for equality in the art world for women and other marginalized artists and the protection of all living creatures.
Over the years, male curators, and critics, who favored artwork created in the vein of the male-centered art historical canon, often overlooked her work. Rather than backing down, Chicago took on the challenge of changing these attitudes in the art world through the founding of the first Feminist Art Program at Fresno State, CA; the creation of her epic work, The Dinner Party, which sought to counter the erasure of women’s history; and the development of a K-12 “Dinner Party” curriculum. In subsequent projects and bodies of work, she has addressed the prescient issues of birth and creation in the Birth Project, the construct of masculinity in PowerPlay, the horrors of genocide in the Holocaust Project, and most recently, the subject of mortality and its relation to the destruction of our planet in The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction.
Chicago took the fashion world by storm with her collaboration with Dior and its creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri for the Spring 2020 haute couture show in Paris. Chicago’s career retrospective opened to rave reviews in August 2021 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. In celebration of her retrospective, Chicago unveiled her largest Smoke Sculpture to date, Forever de Young, seen by more than 35,000 people worldwide.
The author of fifteen books, Chicago wrote her definitive memoir, The Flowering, published in July 2021 by Thames & Hudson and cited as one of the best books of the year. The award-winning newsmagazine show CBS Sunday Morning recently profiled Chicago.