Judy Chicago is an influential artist, educator and author of sixteen books. Her career spans almost six decades during which time she has produced a prodigious body of art that has been exhibited all over the world. Born Judith Cohen in Chicago, Illinois, in 1939, and known briefly after her first marriage as Judy Gerowitz, she later adopted the surname, “Chicago” as a feminist statement renouncing the names given to her by birth and marriage. By the age of five she knew she wanted to be an artist and as a child attended classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. She would later receive her BFA in 1962 and MFA in 1964 from UCLA. In 1970, Chicago initiated the United States’ groundbreaking Feminist Art Program at California State University, Fresno and began developing a feminist approach to art making.
Judy Chicago is perhaps best known for her iconic collaborative undertaking, The Dinner Party (1974–1979). This work includes 39 place settings on a table, each honoring an important figure in women’s history. The Dinner Party, however, is just one work in a career that spans artistic schools and embraces a variety of media from pyrotechnics to needlework.
Among her earliest nationally recognized works was the minimalist sculpture, Rainbow Picket, which was included in the landmark 1966 New York City exhibition, Primary Structures. In the late 1960’s, she began her work in pyrotechnics, starting with the Atmospheres series, then later incorporating female figures for Women and Smoke. By the early 1970s, Chicago had dedicated herself to feminist expression. A hallmark of this period is Womanhouse (1971-1972), an influential installation she and fellow artist, Miriam Schapiro, oversaw as part of the Feminist Art Program that Chicago brought to CalArts from its origins in Fresno. Working with more than 20 art students and local artists they transformed a dilapidated house in Los Angeles into one of the first major works of feminist art.
Chicago continued to address feminist and other social justice themes through concurrent bodies of work: birth and creation in the Birth Project (1980–1985), the construct of masculinity in Power Play (1982-1987), the horrors of genocide in the Holocaust Project (1985–1993), civic rights and moral responsibility in Resolutions: A Stitch in Time (1994-2000), and environmental destruction in The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction (2012-2018) among many others.
Her first retrospective was hosted in 2021 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. A second major retrospective, Herstory, opened at the New Museum in New York in the fall of 2023. In 2024, Herstory toured to the Luma Foundation in Arles, France and a third retrospective, Revelations, opened at Serpentine in London. In 2025, Revelations toured to Kunsthalle Recklinghausen in Germany.
Over the course of her career, 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. “I believe more than ever in the power of art to transform consciousness,” she has commented. Chicago resides and collaborates with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman in Belen, New Mexico.