Judy Chicago (born Judy Cohen on July 20, 1939)[nb 1] is a feminist artist, author, and educator.
Chicago has been creating artwork since the mid 1960s. Her earliest forays into the art world coincided with the rise of Minimalism, which she eventually abandoned in favor of art she believed to have greater content and relevance. Major works include The Dinner Party, a collaborative piece created by a team of 129 artists and administrators and currently housed at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum and the multimedia work The Holocaust Project: From Darkness to Light.[3]
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Born in 1939 in Chicago, her first artistic training began in 1947, when she took weekend art lessons for children at the Art Institute of Chicago.[4] She moved to Los Angeles in 1957 to attend UCLA art school, where she was graduated in 1962. 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.
A full page ad in the October 1970 Artforum announced Chicago's name change from Gerowitz. The ad says she made the change to divest "herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance...".[5] The name change may have also been emulating members of the Black Panther Party, who believed their given names only re-enforced their "slave" identities.
In 1970, Chicago founded the first Feminist Art program in the United States 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.
In 1971 Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro jointly founded the CalArts Feminist Art Program in Valencia, California, effectively moving the program Chicago had started at Cal State Fresno to this new venue.[6] Together they organized one of the first-ever feminist art exhibitions - Womanhouse - on view in an old mansion in Los Angeles from January 30-February 28, 1972.[7] Chicago and Schapiro also worked with the art critic Lucy Lippard, curator Marcia Tucker, and other women in the arts to found West-East Bag (WEB), a group devoted to conducting research and sharing information about women in the arts in the hopes of improving the status of women artists.[8]
In 1973, Chicago co-founded the Feminist Studio Workshop, an independent art school for women, with art historian Arlene Raven and graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville.[9] The Feminist Studio Workshop was housed in the Los Angeles Woman's Building, a feminist art teaching and exhibition space and women's community center.[10]
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. The U.S. copyright representative for Judy Chicago and Through the Flower is the Artists Rights Society.[11] A biography, Becoming Judy Chicago; A Biography of the Artist, by Dr. Gail Levin, was released in February, 2007. In 2011 Chicago gave Penn State University Libraries the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection, one of the most important private collections of feminist art education. The collection is housed in the University Archives in the Special Collections Library, 104 Paterno Library, on Penn State’s University Park campus, as well as online; it includes archival material such as videos, photos, and notes on teaching projects, but not pieces of her artwork.[12][13]
Judy Chicago is an advisory board member of the organization Feminists for Animal Rights.[14]