Judy Chicago
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Judy Chicago (born July 20, 1939) is a feminist artist, author, and educator.
In 1971 Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro jointly founded for the CalArts Feminist Art Program for the California Institute of the Arts. Together they organised one of the first-ever feminist art exhibitions - Womanhouse - 30 January-28 February 1972. The theme of the exhibition was women’s work in the home and parodied stereotypes about women. Each woman had her own room to alter or performance piece to perform. Proceeds from the sale of various artefacts were channelled back into the Feminist Art Program. The exhibition was an installation and performance piece set up in an abandoned 17-room house in Hollywood, California. Key feminist concepts such as collaboration and consciousness raising were used in the art-making process. The exhibitors actively strove to introduce woman-centered art.
Judy Chicago is most famous for her 1974-1979 work The Dinner Party. This work, in which hundreds of volunteers participated, is now permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum, and documented in numerous books. It is a homage to women's history in the form of a large triangular table with symbolic ceramic plates representing 39 famous feminist guests-of-honor. Other famous works include Birth Project (which brought together a national network of skilled needleworkers 1980 -1985), the 1993 Holocaust Project personifying the final solution, and the 1994 work Resolutions, which returned to the theme of feminism, a thread that runs through all of her work.
She was born in Chicago to a family with a strong Jewish American lineage, although she was raised in a secular home. She received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Currently, she 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.
Written works
- Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (1975)
- The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage (1979)
- Embroidering Our Heritage: The Dinner Party Needlework (1980)
- The Birth Project (1985)
- Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light (1993)
- The Dinner Party (1996)
- Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist (1996)
- Fragments from the Delta of Venus (2004)
- Kitty City: A Feline Book of Hours (2005)