"I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism."
Judy Chicago (b. 1939, Chicago, Illinois) is a pioneering feminist artist, advocate, and educator. Throughout her six-decade career, she has challenged the male-dominated art world by centering the female experience in her artwork. Judy Chicago has been a leading force in reshaping art history to include the perspectives and narratives of women.
Trained at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she received her BFA in 1962 and MFA in 1964, Chicago initially worked in a Minimalist style, gaining recognition in the 1960s. However, by the end of that decade, she began shifting her focus toward feminist content, channeling personal experience and social critique into her art and drawing inspiration from “ordinary” women. Feminism would remain central to her practice.
In 1970, she founded the first Feminist Art Program in the United States. Chicago’s best-known work, The Dinner Party (1974–1979), is a multimedia installation celebrating 39 historical and mythical women. Created in collaboration with hundreds of volunteers using media traditionally associated with women’s craft (needlework, ceramics, embroidery), the work stands as a powerful symbol of feminism and has become an icon of 20th-century art.
Her subsequent major projects further expanded the scope of feminist art, offering a hopeful, forward-looking vision grounded in women’s experiences. The Birth Project (1980–1985) confronted the near-total absence of birth imagery in Western art. PowerPlay (1982) explored constructions of masculinity, while Resolutions: A Stitch in Time (1994–2000), revisited traditional proverbs and moral teachings through mixed media and needlework.
Chicago's work is in major collections around the world, including the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate Modern, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” (2018) and Artsy’s “Most Influential Artist” (2018), and in 2019, she received the Visionary Woman Award from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.